USB Key Compatibility?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 12:21:11AM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> I've got a USB key I'm trying to troubleshoot for a friend.  It's a
> 4GB unit; seems pretty generic.
> 
> The desire is to have it "play" with both Windows and Mac systems.  I
> haven't got Windows handy; what I'm finding is that on anything
> Unix-like (Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS), data seems to spontaneously corrupt
> upon unmounting.
> 
> Does this seem consistent with, say, cruddy design?  I know there are
> variations between USB keys vis-a-vis whether they'll boot
> successfully; is this corruption likely a similar sort of thing?
> 
> I'd hate to report back "buy less crappy hardware," but I'd rather
> that than spend a lot of time debugging something that won't work...

How are you using it?  So far I have never had a problem with doing:

mount device
read/write files
umount device

Then when umount returns, I unplug it (and never before).

My wife uses a 4GB usb key, and so far it was rather trashed by a
windows machine, to the point that I had to reformat the filesystem
(with mkdosfs -F 32) from linux, because XP couldn't even tolerate the
corruption long enough to issue a reformat.  After reformating it seems
to have worked OK (although she has stayed away from the school lab
machine that trashed it in the first place).

--
Len Sorensen
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