General Computing Questions

General Questions

These are some of the more general questions which don't warrent a section of their own

How do I use my USB drive?

The computers are configured to allow USB thumb drives. Under Windows its easy, plug in the drive and it should find it automatically. Under Linux you will need to mount the drive yourself by using the command "mount /mnt/usb". Don't forget to unmount the drive before you remove it.

I tried that and it still won't work

First piece of advice - reboot. Often if the person before you did not unmount their drive cleanly the system will get confused and not be able to mount a second drive in the same location. This is especially true with Linux since there is only the single mount point.

If that doesn't work, check the obvious things. See if the system has found the drive, check to see if its formatted, ensure its plugged in properly. If it still does not work, you're on your own. There are too many USB drives for us to offer support for them. Some do have compatability problems with various hardware combinations. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, well, too bad.