fallenpegasus | Futzing with a USB storage thingeee (Reply)

I was given a box of MySQL PS swag. One of the items is a 256MB USB storage thingeee. I just tried mounting it for the first time today, it's got some interesting quirks.

It doesnt have a MBR or a partition table, instead just formatted like a floppy disk, with a msdos boot sector at the start. This is different from all the other storage thingees I own, which are all formatted like HDs, and have a partition table. This difference sometimes confused the hald automounter.
It has no MSDOS filesystem label. Thus it got mounted as "/media/disk". That I consider a weakness in the hald automounter. If there is no disklabel, there are lots of good things to fallback to. Maybe I should dig into hald and see how hard this would be to add and how welcomeing they would be to the patch.

MSDOS fs serialnumber: "A018-E668"
SCSI device serialnumber: "4CD98788"
USB device serialnumber: "4CD98788"
SCSI bus,channel,id,lun,vendor,model: "05000000 Generic Storage Alcor Flash Disk"
USB bus,port,dev,mfgr,prod: "040317 Generic Mass Storage"

And when I dump out the raw sector blocks, most of the them are just strings of "FF", but occationally there is a 32bit value at the beginning or end of a sector. Maybe the remains of the factory qualification tests?

I'm thinking of reformatting it, and then keeping my MySQL SSH key on it.