Right. I was using Slack 10 with the 2.4.28 kernel. No problems with USB - my memory stick and PDA were picked up no trouble.

Now I'm on Gentoo with a 2.6.9 kernel. And I can't get ANYTHING recognised on USB.

When I boot up, all the USB shows up as fine:
So does devfs, for that matter. . .
But when I plug in a USB device... Nothing. No messages appear in any of the logs. /proc/bus/usb remains empty. lsusb shows nothing. /dev/usb and /dev/scsi remain empty.

As far as I can tell from my kernel, USB and SCSI support are fully enabled. There are no error messages anywhere. I just can't get anything on USB recognised as existing.

Please, suggest something! I'm beginning to think it's laughing at me!

is hotplug running?

Try to download tools like usbview from sourceforge.net , maybe you can see better from this tool.

Well, it's enabled in the kernel. . .

OK, I'll give them a go. . .

Cheers!

usbview doesn't show anything new. Nothing registers on it when I plug in a USB stick. . .

Ah. Well, here's something.

When I have the USB flash plugged in as I boot up, it seems to be at least partially detected:

df shows:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda10 4806904 2830868 1731852 63% /
/dev/hda1 46633 12055 32170 28% /boot
/dev/hda6 4730600 414240 4072176 10% /home
/dev/hda7 19228276 8621620 9629908 48% /space
none 257508 0 257508 0% /dev/shm

(It's a 256MB key)

and mount gives
/dev/hda10 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw,noatime)
/dev/hda6 on /home type ext3 (rw,noatime)
/dev/hda7 on /space type ext3 (rw,noatime)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

Does that help..?

Hi 1+1=2,

I'm running Gentoo with the 2.6.9 kernel as well, but my USB works just fine. I wonder if you set up an entry in the file /etc/fstab for your usb device. Mine looks like:

/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 noatime,ro 1 2
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs noatime 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/flash vfat noauto,user,rw 0 0

The /dev/sda1 entry is for the USB device. Do you have such a line? Also, you have to create a mount point, I created /mnt/flash. Then when the usb device is plugged in (and the usb mass storage module is loaded) I issue a mount command: mount /dev/sda1 and the contents of the usb device are then available in /mnt/flash.

I haven't got such a line, no, because /dev/sda1 doesn't exist. . .

I just rebooted without having the USB drive plugged in, incidentally, and /dev/shm still exists just as before. So I guess it wasn't detecting my USB drive after all.

Maybe I should try installing genkernel and see if USB works from that. At least then I'd know if it was a kernel issue. . .

Hi 1+1=2,

Try to take people's suggestions to heart ok? I'm fairly certain my previous post will help you. Some additional info: /dev/shm has NOTHING to do with usb devices. It is used for ram disks, which most linux distros set up. Also, although it isn't obvious your usb devices will be recognized by most distros (including Gentoo) as something like sda or sdb. Try it.

Ok, added it to fstab & rebooted.

Okay, now this is just getting worse and worse. . .

I had enabled UHCI support, as this was what I thought I had. However, or booting into Slack (where USB works) I found that it was showing OHCI as active.

So, hoorah, I think, that's the problem. I have the wrong thing enabled.

So I go recompile the kernel, switch off UHCI, switch on OHCI, and reboot.

Is it fixed? Is it Hell!

In fact, it's working even LESS than before. lsusb gives no output, just jams solid. Trying to access the "devices" file in the /proc/bus/usb directory jams solid too.

Having OHCI and UHCI both compiled gives the same results. Compiling them as modules gives nothing better.

So now I have the choice of enabling OHCI and having it lock up a terminal whenever I try and access anything USB-related, or I can compile UHCI, which I haven't got, but which doesn't cause lockups.

What the blazes is going on??

ARGH! This is driving me nuts!

I went into the kernel config and switched OFF the options that I'd previously turned ON in trying to get USB working.

And lo and behold, suddenly, it works! I plug in my flash disk, and there it is, on dmesg and the syslog and in lsusb

Woohoo! Success at last. It's been recognised and is working flawlessly.

Except it doesn't seem to have a corresponding /dev entry. So even tho it's recognised, I have no idea how to mount it.

The messages I get when I plug it in are:
Just telling it to mount /dev/sda1 doesn't work any better than before. It's found the hardware, but not as far as devfs is concerned. Even manually creating /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 hasn't helped.

Any ideas?

1&1,

This is a long shot, but you might try turning OFF hotplug. I had all sorts of problems with USB until I turned hotplug off. It seems to be broken (in my distro, with my hardware, at least).

Hope this helps.

Hi 1+1=unlucky?

Well, since I've got the same setup (Gentoo kernel 2.6.9) I'll tell you exactly what I did and I can't do more than that!

In my kernel config I turned on EHCI (which is USB 2.0), OHCI (for NForce 2), and UHCI (Via and Intel). If your usb ports are version 2.0 then you probably need the EHCI support. I also have usb mass storage turned on as a module.

Then I compiled the kernel, added the /dev/sda1 line to my fstab file, and created the mountpoint /mnt/flash

When I use the usb flash disk, I always modprobe the usb-storage module manually as I don't use it that much. Then I plug in the device and the do the mount /dev/sda1. That's it - she works, works, works.

Here is a look at my dmesg:

ehci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: nVidia Corporation nForce2 USB Controller
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:02.2 to 64
ehci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: irq 20, pci mem e080e000
ehci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
PCI: cache line size of 64 is not supported by device 0000:00:02.2
ehci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: USB 2.0 enabled, EHCI 1.00, driver 2004-May-10
hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 1-0:1.0: 6 ports detected
ohci_hcd: 2004 Feb 02 USB 1.1 'Open' Host Controller (OHCI) Driver (PCI)
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:02.0[A] -> GSI 22 (level, high) -> IRQ 22
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.0: nVidia Corporation nForce2 USB Controller
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:02.0 to 64
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.0: irq 22, pci mem e0810000
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 2-0:1.0: 3 ports detected
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:02.1[B] -> GSI 21 (level, high) -> IRQ 21
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: nVidia Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (#2)
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:02.1 to 64
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: irq 21, pci mem e0812000
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3
hub 3-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 3-0:1.0: 3 ports detected
USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v2.2
usbcore: registered new driver usblp
drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: v0.13: USB Printer Device Class driver
usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.0:USB HID core driver

good luck!

Finally fixed it! I wasn't aware that hotplug had been split into hotplug and coldplug. So I hadn't emerged coldplug. That did it.

Had to recompile the kernel again as I'd forgotten to enable Palm support, but now my flash disk and PDA both talk to my computer, so that's everything working at last.

Thanks to all for the advice