FreeBSD 5.1 & USB Pen Drive
 

I recently installed 5.1 and have to say, compared to 4.8, setting up X and KDE was a breeze this time. Only real problem I'm having is with my USB pen drive. Plugging it in from the GUI causes a hard lock of the entire system (ctrl-alt-bksp does nothing) without initializing the device; a reset is required to get up and running again. Hotplugging works fine at the command line, and drive can easily be mounted with: # mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt
Just doesn't work when running X. Really annoying to have to exit X, plug in pen drive then startx again!! Anyway, spent a couple hours googling without finding an answer. Output from usbdevs and camcontrol follows below. Only USB devices plugged in are the mouse and the pen drive, and they're on different controllers. I did tell X to use direct access to mouse during initial setup, if that matters. Would be one thing if it just didn't work, but locking up the system when I plug it in stinks.

# usbdevs -v

Controller /dev/usb0:
addr:1 full speed, self powered, config1, OHCI root hub(0x0000), SiS(0x0000), rev 1.00
port 1 powered
port 2 addr2: full speed, power 100 mA, config 1, product 0x1050(0x1050), vendor 0x0c45(0x0c45), rev 1.10
port 3 powered
Controller /dev/usb1:
addr:1 full speed, self powered, config1, OHCI root hub(0x0000), SiS(0x0000), rev 1.00
port 1 powered
port 2 addr2: full speed, power 100 mA, config 1, product 0x4d03(0x4d03), Primax Electronics(0x0461), rev 4.41

# camcontrol devlist

<USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE 0.10> at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,da0)

edited to add: even exiting X to doesn't seem to work :( locked up at command line when trying to umount device with a "fatal trap 9: general protection fault while in kernel mode", "current process = 886 (umount)". At least there's no blue screen, a black screen of death is much more appropriate. :o

Are you running a current load? Do you have umass, scbus and da devices built in your kernel? I don't have one of these drives, but I use my digital camera in a very similar manner and my last CURRENT load was done with sources from Oct 2 and I am not having any problems. In fact my system is very solid.

I recommend that you do a cvsup with that date and you should be fine IMO. I don't know about sources right now.

All those modules seem to be in the canned kernel. I haven't recompiled from the latest source, but it does work from the console. I can mount it and transfer files to an fro. It's when I startx that all heck breaks loose on me. The device stops reponding and unmounting causes a GPF. If I hotplug it while in X it GPFs immediately. Methinks it's X's fault, therefore.

I'm on a slow dialup connection, so the thought of downloading hundreds of megs of source code is a scary proposition. :(

I reinstalled FreeBSD 5.1 without ACPI support and can now use my USB flash drive from within X without any lockups. Not exactly sure why that worked -- I disabled ACPI for a completely different reason -- but it did. LOL :D

Man, it's hard to remember to use -t msdos instead of -t vfat and da0s1 instead of sda1 at times... anyway, now all I need is to get sound and the wheel on the mouse working and I'll be set. ;) Everything else is working great!

Just put an entry in /etc/fstab

/dev/da0s1 /mnt/usbmass msdos rw,noauto

Then you can conveniently do

# mount /mnt/usbmass

I find it better to create multiple mount points in /mnt so I can have floppy, cd-rom, usbmass, etc mounted simultaneously.

# for i in floppy cdrom usbmass ; do mkdir /mnt/${i} ; done

Hehe, if you click on the FreeBSD screenshot in my tagline you'll see I've already done that (unmounted fstab entries are shown on desktop). Too bad I can't figure out how to use the mount menu item KDE provides when I right click the icons tho. Wouldn't need to do any typing then. ;) Guess the supermount stuff in Linux has spoiled me. :D Thanks for the tip anyway.. neat script too BTW.

Oh, and adding:
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
to the input section for mouse in XF86Config got the wheel working. Still no luck with my integrated SiS 630 sound card... :(