USB flash drive Error -84
 

I receive the following error when I insert my flash drive (dmesg | tail):

This is a new flash drive because my old one got messed up on the same machine a few days ago and now gives the following:

Interestingly, both my keyboard and printer work fine even though they are connected to the same USB hub. Any tips on how to handle this? Thanks. (Yes, I've tried connecting directly to the USB port)

Have you tested the drive on a different computer? I've had problems in the past with a variety of USB external disks with vfat filesystems. If there's no important data on the disk, it might be worth reformatting it, possibly with a different filesystem such as ext2, and maybe also recreating and writing the partition table.

I also once had a Slackware system that had something faulty with the USB host system. Still no idea what was wrong with it, it corrupted any device that I connected to it, and I assumed it was a hardware problem. After a while I wiped the system and installed Ubuntu on it, and the USB system has worked perfectly ever since. Not that this info is necessarily much help, but there seems to be some voodoo going on!

Thanks Gethyn. Yep, the new flash disk works fine on other machines. I tried accessing it on the original machine with Ubuntu 7.04 as a live CD and I still got the same error message. I'm a bit reluctant to reformat the flash disk but I shall see if there are any more responses to my post. Surely I am not the only person who has experienced this error??
(As for the old flash disk, Windows was unable to reformat it but I shall give it another try on Linux).

USB Keyboard seems to be the culprit...
 

I reformatted my flash disk, disabled dbus/HAL, got rid of my USB hub... Still no luck. Then, after much trial and error, I replaced my USB keyboard with an old PS/2 keyboard and disabled USB keyboard support in the BIOS. It seems the main culprit was the USB keyboard and I am now able to mount and use my flash disk and there are no error messages.
But between the USB keyboard, the USB hub, and my LVM partitions (which I somehow managed to screw up), I don’t know whether to call this a hardware issue or a software bug!