When I start up my machine, hotplug works fine for the first few tries (I plug in my iPod and I see the detection in dmesg), but after a few tries, its presence is no longer reflected in dmesg. Any idea what the problem could be?

Distro: Arch linux
Kernel: 2.6.19.1

Thanks!

Anyone? Please, I would really like to remedy this issue.

A wild guess:

Are you running sync before unplugging the iPod?

No, but I use umount, which, if I'm not mistaken, syncs the filesystem before doing the actual unmounting, kind of like closing a file.

Did your "udevd" die perhaps?

Questions:

1. Are you using usbmount? (device is mounted in /media/usbx where x is 1 to 8.

2. Can you count how many times the ipod is successfully detected before detection stops working?

3. After the last successful detection does dmesg give any relevant messages(s)?

4. At each insertion, is the ipod detected as the same device or does the device number increment, eg SDC1. SDC2. SDC3 etc?

Note that while you are probably right about umount and sync, nowhere in the man pages is it stated explicitly that umount calls sync.