[TriLUG] Flash Friendly Filesystems: was e2fsck under cron gets retcode=8 operational error

[matt at noway2.thruhere.net]

> Not necessarily.  I would assume that you could bypass the firmware
> and use it in raw mode with a command to the flash drive, but I
> haven't tried to do that.

Several years ago, I worked on a USB host controller project to allow an
embedded system to use a USB Flash stick.  If I recall correctly, the USB
provided 3 end point descriptors: one for the control port and 2 for the
bulk transport (one up, one down).  From there you were able to use
wrappers to encapsulate the SCSI command set.  I don't recall seeing any
options for raw access, below that of the logical file system (sector
number access).

To see what options would be available, try using USB Snoopy to see if you
can catch the end point descriptors during the USB enumeration.  You may
also be able to get this information from a lookup of the vendor and
hardware ID.