Can't mount USB drive

Kropotkin · 11-12-2007, 11:59 AM

Hi all,

Last month, a 500Gb LaCie external USB drive of mine crashed, for lack of a more precise term. My system no longer recognized it; dmesg was full of "Buffer I/O" errors. I tried to repartition in with fdisk and reformat it with mkifs to no avail.

The drive was still under guarantee so I sent it back LaCie. Today I received back again. LaCie technical service declared that the drive was OK, only they didn't recognize the format (ext3) so that reformatted it with NTFS.

However, when I reconnected it to my system, it is still not recognized and dmesg throws up a lot of error messages:

Code:

usb 4-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
usb 4-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb-storage: device scan complete
usb 4-2: reset full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
usb 4-2: reset full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Maxtor   Grizzly          HA3D PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Unit Not Ready
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Add. Sense: Logical block address out of range
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] READ CAPACITY(16) failed
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Use 0xffffffff as device size
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] 4294967296 512-byte hardware sectors (2199023 MB)
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Write Protect is off
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Mode Sense: 53 00 00 08
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Unit Not Ready
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Add. Sense: Logical block address out of range
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] READ CAPACITY(16) failed
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Use 0xffffffff as device size
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] 4294967296 512-byte hardware sectors (2199023 MB)
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Write Protect is off
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Mode Sense: 53 00 00 08
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdh:end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
Dev sdh: unable to read RDB block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 0
 unable to read partition table
sd 7:0:0:0: [sdh] Attached SCSI disk
sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg9 type 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967168
Buffer I/O error on device sdh, logical block 536870896
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967168
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967280
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967280
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 8
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967232
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967280
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 4294967288
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0
[...]

Nor I am able to open it with fdisk:

Code:

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdh
Unable to read /dev/sdh

At this point I am out of ideas. Any suggestions?

I am running Fedora 8 with the 2.6.23.1-49 kernel. I have a couple other LaCie USB drives connected to my system which work fine.

Brian1 · 11-12-2007, 05:24 PM

If you have say the 2.6.22.****** kernel still installed boot up with that. If not install one and see if that works. Could be a kernel issue with the USB controller or generic scsi with your hardware.

Does it by chance work on another system or Windows system?
Have you tried any other USB drives or flash cards on this machine.
Have you tried it in another different USB port.
Could be down to a bad USB controller or USB port.

Brian

Kropotkin · 11-13-2007, 03:46 PM

Brian,

I have other USB drives connected to my F8 system which work fine, so I assume it is not an issue with the USB controller.

Just now, I connected the drive to my laptop with Ubuntu running kernel 2.6.22-14, and the dmesg output is virtually the same.

Alas, I don't have a windows system here to test it with; I just have to take the word of LaCie tech support that they were able to mount and format the drive under windows without problem.

Brian1 · 11-13-2007, 05:47 PM

Only other thought is download and boot a Live CD like kubuntu, Knoppix, or any other. Then see what it reports when the drive is plugged in.

Brian