USB drive stops computer
 

Hi all! I'm having some trouble connecting/mounting a USB drive to my linux server. Running Red Hat 7.3, and primarily working in Xwindows.. because i'm still not crazy familiar with Linux (trying to learn though). I plugged in the USB drive that i've used primarily with windows boxes, formatted with Fat32 filesystem. Then the linux box froze. Couldn't do anything! and the USB drive was blinking yellow and orange (usually just has a steady orange light). unplugged the drive and powercycled the server... and eventually everything got back to normal. but i haven't tried re-connecting the drive again yet. Any suggestions? I tried searching previous threads, but they all seemed to have the pre-requisite of me being able to still use the server after i plug in the usb drive:<)

any help is appreciated! Thanks!

-Michael

P.S. It's a 40GB LaCie drive if that helps any.

only one suggestion about finding out more about the freeze
tail -f /var/log/syslog &
in a terminal as root, kept open
then plug the drive, kernel should spit error messages
These messages should tell you more

RH 7.3 is ancient and I doubt it had very good usb support in that kernel. IIRC usb support wasn't that good in RH 9, much less RH 7.3. Upgrade to a more modern distro is the easy solution.

Was also going to say ancient, but everytime I say that people say
they have good reasons, or that they have upgraded packages.
What does lsmod give for oechi driver?
Then modinfo nameof_chi_drivers (I mean these 2 usb kernel modules
called echi ochi something like that)

Thanks for the suggestion and help Any suggestions for the upgrade distro? Is the Fedora Core okay and stable enough for a business? or should i just go for the red hat enterprise?

-Michael

Sorry nearly unable to comment on your last question. No linux business experience. Is it centOS which is made from red Hat enterprise?
By stable I suppose you would have to describe what is mission critical, and
what the server needs to do.
If the server is critical then why not pay for the support?
It will all depend on the size of the company, cashflow, and risk management.

Centos is an RHEL identical clone with the RH trademarks and references removed(legally required). For a server, I would take a look at suse, debian and slackware as well. Ubuntu is a debian based distro that has a special server edition:

http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/5.10/

suse, ubuntu and RHEL are probably more user friendly than pure debian or slackware. Mandriva can also be used as a server and is pretty user friendly for noobs:

http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=8974