Ok... so here's the situation. I have Suse 9.0 running on a Epox nforce motherboard with an attached firewire card. I have an ipod. Once, and only once, I was able to detect the ipod and mount the appropiate vfat partition, run gtkpod, and be happy. Every time I've tried since I am not able to find the attached ipod at all. I also have an external hard drive that runs on either firewire or usb2; the usb2 works fine, but I was never able to detect it via firewire.

The firewire ports work fine in windows.

That one magical time that everything worked, I'm pretty sure I just did the following:

- plugged in ipod
- typed "fdisk -l" as root
- saw the ipod listed as device sdb
- used "fdisk /dev/sdb" to see which partition on the ipod was formatted vfat
- typed "mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/ipod"
- started up gtkpod, could bring up ipod files and all that goodness
- said, "hooray! I'll play more with this later" and then umounted the ipod and typed "rmmod sbp2"

Every other time since I try the following:

- I make sure that modules ieee1394, ohci1394, and sbp2 are loaded (raw1394 is loaded too)
- I type "fdisk -l" and there is no entry for the ipod
- I plug in and unplug the ipod with no success
- I scream in frustration

I have tried using the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script to no avail (it doesn't show up), and have tried rebooting. In fact the only thing I can think of that has changed on my system since that time that it worked is that I rebooted.

Any ideas? Is there something simple that I am missing? It's like I was dreaming when it happened... the firewire card hasn't done anything else for me in linux (never got that hard drive to work off of it). I almost wish it never worked so I wouldn't be this frustrated....

Thanks in advance for any help.

why would you rmmod a module that you might use again?

look:
[root@localhost jasper]# /sbin/lsmod
Module Size Used by Not tainted
sr_mod 18136 0 (autoclean)
i830 74336 1
agpgart 47776 11 (autoclean)
nfs 81336 1 (autoclean)
lockd 58704 1 (autoclean) [nfs]
sunrpc 81564 1 (autoclean) [nfs lockd]
autofs 13268 0 (autoclean) (unused)
8139too 18088 1
mii 3976 0 [8139too]
microcode 4668 0 (autoclean)
ide-scsi 12208 0
scsi_mod 107160 2 [sr_mod ide-scsi]
ide-cd 35708 0
cdrom 33728 0 [sr_mod ide-cd]
keybdev 2944 0 (unused)
mousedev 5492 1
hid 22148 0 (unused)
input 5856 0 [keybdev mousedev hid]
usb-uhci 26348 0 (unused)
ehci-hcd 19976 0 (unused)
usbcore 78784 1 [hid usb-uhci ehci-hcd]
ext3 70784 2
jbd 51892 2 [ext3]


I dont ever have to use rmmod for anything and all 6 of my usb ports work, with my scsi-usb drives, lan, both harddrives, ide-scsi cdrom. All my shit works always.
And as you can see there are plenty modules that are unused even.

I used "rmmod sbp2" because that was the only way that the ipod would bring up the "ok to disconnect screen". Even after unmounting it, the screen would still read "do not disconnect" until I rmmoded. I'm glad all your sh*t works always.

i also have just recently started having problems with my firewire. it worked for a good 6 months, i plug it in today, nothing.

the only thing i have done is upgrade the kernel from 2.4.20 to 2.4.24. i checked to make sure everything was still where it needed to be, which it was. i dunno. its messed up

I have had similar problems... I'm really beginning to dislike that nasty little sbp2 module.

However, have you tried eject?

Instead of using umount & rmmod sbp2 try eject /dev/sdb2 or eject /mnt/ipod

This brings up the 'OK to disconnect' logo and the sbp2 module doesn't have to be removed (which I think has been the source of a lot of my problems).

To remount the Ipod I have to physically disconnect it, then reconnect at which point it says 'Do not disconnect', presummably because the sbp2 module is still loaded. Then a mount command does the business.