For the life of me I cannot figure out this problem. Im ashamed because I once was a System Administrator. Ive used linux since 1994, but I feel like Im bashing my head. I havnt really had a computer the past few years, except for my powerbook.... i know.. maybe Ive been spoiled at this point.. Anyways I got this pc and never really messed with it much until recently

Onto the problem my external USb harddrive isnt working.

Its found in boot up
then when udevadm starts my system sits there forever, so I turned off the harddrive and linux boots normally.


Turning it back on, and looking at dmesg I see this repeating forever until I turn off the drive (also the read light on the drive just keeps going and going:

The problem is coming from udev Im 99% sure, since when I turn off udev, the drive shows up, the lights stop flashing, and no errors in dmesg.

Even worse is, a while back I had installed slackware 12.1 on this, and had the same problem.. I fixed it, but cannot for the life of me remember how! When I went to mess around with this computer again, I noticed slackware 12.2 was out so went ahead and installed it fresh. Also compiled the newest kernel. Though.. the problem was present when I first booted slackware 12.2 without compling a new kernel.

If I can remember through my hazy memory, I think I fixed this with some sorta rule.. but honestly for the life of me I cannot remember how. Also the last time I used linux on a regular basis, there was no udev, and I was messing with devfs at the time.

Thanks for any help. My brain must of rotted with OS X.

I did a quick google search on your "idVendor=4971" and it led me to this post. The guy posted about his usb storage device with similar specs. He ultimately downloaded a tar file for 65-persistent-storage.rules that he posted a link too and it solved his problem. Here is a link is to a udev rule.
http://tux.nchc.org.tw/trac/tux2live...-storage.rules

I'm not sure it will solve your problem but it might point you in the right direction.

Ive tried that, Ive tried writing my own rules from scratch.

udev is pissing me off. It doesnt help that Im not familer with it.

Ive also noticed that this is a common problem across several distributions, googling around. Nobody provides a clear solution to this. It simply amazes me that I cannot plug this in and then mount it. Its recognized by the kernel. Even says its attached on sda. However the repeated messages of Sense Key, only start when udev begins. udev will not create /dev/sda or anything for it.

Its confounding, since its obviously a problem with udev. Half considering going back to a static /dev, but I do see the benefits of something like udev. udev just wasnt a thing Ive ever really used, the closest ive ever messed with on linux like this is devfs (and that was many years ago, and didnt present any problems to me).

I mean unless Im missing something here.. but why does udev send the drive into an endless spin printing these messages? udev cant just get the information it needs from the kernel? Even when I try to write my own rule and then restart udev it still does it. There must be something Im missing.

However, you plug in anything else in usb or even every other device I have on my computer is handled just fine by udev.

For the life of me I cannot figure out how I fixed this in slackware 12.1

Although it surprises me that a problem like this is still around since the problem has been going on for some time.

I've the same problem whit a digital camera hitachi, reported in forum http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e-12.2-714060/

Recently I try to stop udev service and I can mount the camera, so I think too, the problem is related to udev 1.35 in slack 12.2.

I use whitout problem the camera with another pc with slack 12.0 and udev 1.11

I'll try to install this udev package in slack 12.2 and report the results in my original forum

Bye,
Pierpaolo