usb-storage -issues with USB2.0?
 

Like many others posting here, I've had nothing but trouble trying to get my usb flash drive to work properly under linux, specifically, each version of Mandrake.

I noticed that when I upgraded my son's hand me down PC, Mandrake 10.0 is able to work perfectly fine with the falsh drive. I can insert it and remove it and insert it again and it it just works.

The same is not true of my laptop, nor my current PC, both of which have usb 2.0 ports. I get similar error messages as described in many posts here. Booting with the drive inserted helps, but removing and re-inserting messes the PC up. (Konqueror or a shell will hang.)

The desktop PC has a VIA chipset (Athlon CPU) and the laptop is an e-machine also with an athlon.

I'm not a newbie- I've tried modprobe, fdisk -l, mounting usbfs, recompiling 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. One post suggested that the drive may be formatted wrong, like a super floppy? What's that? I formatted the drive in windows xp- no help.

Can anyone suggest a procedure to follow to diagnose the problem, rather than trying one random idea at a time as I google the net?

When you say "removing and re-inserting messes the PC up," perhaps you could give a more
technical idea of what "messing up" means. Did you umount the device before removing it?
Mine works fine in Slack, and this is how it's setup:
As user I mount and then when finished I umount, no problems. I do notice that if I mount
one of my other 8 USB devices, and then umount, I cannot mount any other device properly
unless I reboot.

You also you formatted the drive in Windoze - as what file system? If NTFS, then you will
only have read access reliably.

"Messed up" includes several problems. Opening Konqueror and attempting to look at the contents of the flash drive cause Konqueror to hang or go into some process difficult to exit from. Likewise, using a shell to explore the contents also hangs.

When I have been successful in mounting the flash drive, I am unable to successfully unmount it- the green light on the drive stays lit. I believe the hotplug scripts that activate upon insertion may be part of the problem, but I don't know how to "turn them off." The hotplugging of the drive, when it works, never refers to /dev/sda1 but rather to a long scsi path name. Mounting /dev/sda1 produces a device not found error.

I've noticed that I have more success with my digital camera which I believe is usb 1.0. More success means I can plug it into the laptop and I can retrieve pictures.

As for the desktop PC, the usb ports just don't work in Mandrake 9.2. Sometimes usbview will detect devices; most often, it does not.

I've just discovered that booting Knoppix on the laptop provides me with a working flash drive. I can mount and unmount sda1 and insert and remove the drive. Maybe my problems are Mandrake specific?

I've never used a file browser with a USB device before I mounted it from cli. That's why I gave you that line for /etc/fstab so that you can mount it as a user rather than root from cli, then use a file browser, or even mc.

As for the light going on and off, it doesn't go off for me in Slack as long as the device is plugged in. In Linux, you mount devices and then you umount (yes, the first n in unmount is missing in the commmand) them. Issue
$ man mount
and read about that command. You may already know this. I never use automount, so cant really advise on that.
Does the listing of devices have to do with devfs (device filesystem)?

My Sony DSC digital camera works the same as the USB mass storage devices, and it works well on all three comps, also. Do you have USB 2.0 support in your kernel?

Sorry, John, I've never used usbview. To detect devices I issue
# lsusb
from cli and add -v if I need more verbose info.

I will tell you this - I have 3 computers in my office right now with Slack 9.1 - two PC's and a lappy. With the default bare.i kernel (2.4.22), they all detected both my USB flash drive and USB gas drive (it's a lappy drive in a USB 2.0 case). Both PC's have USB 2.0, but the lappy has USB 1.0. They can all read and write to those USB devices with no problem.

Since Knopppix works fine on that particular comp, why not look at the .config file and see what you've got. Better yet, you could copy it and then boot into Mandy and compare - or maybe save your present config with a different name, then put the Knoppix config in Mandy and recompile with make oldconfig and maybe you're set. Sounds too easy, what's the flaw?

Sorry I can't be of more help, but every time I've tried to help a Mandy user, it's turned sour. It seems that system does things in peculiar ways, and doesn't install all the libraries needed.

Thanks for help!
 

Your reply helped, but not in quite the way you may have expected. Experimenting more with my Knoppix CD, I learned Knoppix does a better job of handling my usb devices than Mandrake 9.2 or 10.0. (Thanks also for the lsusb command.)

I've been using Mandrake for over five years. The fact that Knoppix "understands" my hardware better than Mandrake made me stop and think. Your quote,

"Sorry I can't be of more help, but every time I've tried to help a Mandy user, it's turned sour. It seems that system does things in peculiar ways, and doesn't install all the libraries needed."

convinces me that I should try another distribution.

Hey, could I put in my two cents for Slack? I used Debian (Knoppix is) before Slack, and it was nice and fast - easy to install. However, when I tried to get stuff with apt-get there were sometimes problems. I ran SID, and to get KDE, for instance, I had to get it from Woody (stable). But that didn't work either, because some of my libraries would have to go backwards, and then apps in unstable wouldn't work.

I think Slack understands the hardware quite well, and it's a true Linux system, also. BSD style, not SysV (like Mandrake and RedHat).

Just thought this thread might be of some help

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=181510