USB hub/card reader and jump drive not being recognized

[o0gnubee0o]

ok so i searched through out this forum and i couldnt really find my answer. i may have over looked it.... but i didnt see it. so... i was wondering if i could get some help.

so ok....
heres the deal(bare with me i have to type a lot). as you can see by my screen name.... im a newbie. so i really dont know my way around yet, and i have a problem. ok... for some reason my USB drives on my motherboard dont seeem to be working correctly. heres the how it goes.... i WAS using a laptop with mandrake 9.2(2.4 kernel i believe). and for the most part everything worked fine. till the hard drive died on me. now when using that system i would plug my jump drive in... and boom. no problem. i never had to configure a thing. it just recognized it right off the bat. but when the hard drive died.... i decided it was time to build myself a box. so i did just that. bought all the parts and chassis and everything. put it all together... and installed madrake 9.2 just as before... only this time the USB ports on the motherboard were acting sort of funny. for instance... at install it wouldnt recognize the USB mouse i was using.... so i had to switch back to a PS2 mouse for that. but after everything was installed.... i hooked it up and it worked. strangely though i sometimes have to unplug it and plug it back in after reboot and restart X before it will work again. and the second thing is... that i cant seem to be able to use my jump drive or USB thumb drive as some people know it, or the memory card reader/ USB hub i have. now it could very well be the drivers in the BIOS but im not sure. i tried installing those with the cd that came with the motherboard when i bought it.... but it didnt really do much. it just gave me some sort of error about not booting from the cdrom. im not sure what it was because i just decided to install 9.2 anyway. and everything works fine eth0, keyboard, printer, most everything EXCEPT these USB devices. but oddly enough the USB mouse works in either port. so i have no clue where to begin. i tried as ROOT to use " mount /mnt/removable " but no dice. it just gave me a error about the fstab. so im out of ideas now.... and i know im just babbling now but i havent slept so im a little out of it. ive been trying to figure this out all night. but anyway... could someone please help? and remember i am new.... so try to walk me through it as in depth as you can. and oh... sometimes my sound out of my speakers comes out like static when im logging into and out of KDE. but inside everything usually sounds fine with the games and movie clips and stuff. any clues on that? anyway... please help. i really need to be able to use the card reader and thumb drive.

thank you very much in advace.
o0gnubee0o

[cybertron]

Try creating a separate thread for your sound issues. That's definitely going to get lost in this post. Besides which you're only supposed to post one question per thread anyway.;)

Then try doing "cat /etc/fstab" in a terminal and see what mount point (if any) that your flash drive is supposed to be mounted at (the line will probably start with /dev/sda). If there isn't anything, then you may need to add it. I think there is a mount points area in the Mandrake control center where you can do that if you don't want to edit fstab by hand. Make sure you turn on supermount and it will automatically recognize your drive when you plug it in, just like before.

[o0gnubee0o]

well i looked in the control center... and i quite sure where to go. theres "Set NFS mount points", "set WEBDAV mount points", and "set SAMBA mount points". and the resst were hd and cdrom points.s o im not sure which one of those i need to go to. and if none.... i could probably do the fstab by hand with some coaching. i also couldnt figure out how to turn supermount on. what should i do next?

[o0gnubee0o]

p.s.sorry bout the seperate question... i was tired when i wrote it and thought it would be ok.

[cybertron]

Ah, they don't exactly make it blatantly obvious how you can do this, do they? Make sure that before you go into there you plug one of the drives in. Then try Mount Points->Partitions again. This time you should see a tab at the top for sda (or similar). Click on that and make sure you toggle to expert mode (button at the bottom). There you'll be able to set the mount point, and if you go into the options you will have a check box for supermount. HTH.

[o0gnubee0o]

no they dont make it very easy... but i definitely dont mind learning. but yeah....
well i tried doing that.... i plugged in my card reader/USB hub.... then my jump drive into that(because it wont fit in the back of my tower with my mouseplugged in.). i went to the mount points... and it was still the same options as before. and i didnt see a button for expert or root. is there one of the buttons i said before it might be under? or should i just do this by hand? and if so how? i know where the fstab directory is... i just dont know exactly how i should change it. what do i need to do next?

[cybertron]

Oh nuts, that's my fault. You actually need to be in partitions, not any of the mount points ones. In there you should see a Toggle to expert mode button and the sda tab. Just in case, you can also get to the configuration screen through the Hardware->Hardware option by clicking on the sda device and "Run config tool" (I think, it's that or the other button;)).

If that doesn't work, you can try adding something like the following to your /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/flash vfat noauto,user 0 0

Just put it on its own line in the file. That won't get you supermount, but I don't have an example of the supermount version handy and it has some different options IIRC.

I'll probably be internet-less for the next few days, so if that doesn't work it'll be a while before I can check this again. Maybe someone else can pick it up.:)