USB drive hangs while reading on Linux
 

Hi,

I just purchased a External USB Drive, a 40GB Toshiba laptop harddisk encased in a VIPOWER HDD casing (Model No: VP-2528SA2). I formatted the

disk as FAT32, with 2 equally sized partions (both primary).

I have no problems mounting the drive as VFAT. The first partition is on /dev/sda1 and the second on /dev/sda2. I can see the free space and

used space.

On a windows machine, I copied a large file 695 mb to the USB disk without problems, and FROM it also.

On the linux machine, while trying to copy this file to the local drive, the drive hangs after copying 96k ! This does not happen in the Windows XP machine.

Another strange thing is that I can write small-size files to the disk on the linux machine (a Redhat 9, I might mention), and read small-size files without any problem.

I visited the www.vipower.com website but it seems they have no linux device drivers for this product. I'm not sure if this is the problem....

Any help is deeply appreciated.

Regards,

Ahsan

Somebody _Please_ help..
 

Somebody _please_ help......

I'm really desperate for a solution. :(((

I tried everything: But it just keeps hanging whenever I try to copy a file from the disk that is larger than 96k... Any file smaller, I can copy without problem.

On windows, it works perfectly....

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The Solution
 

Just upgrade to the 2.6 kernel, and it works perfectly.....

Hey

I have the same exact problem with my external hdd...but i already have the 2.6.81. kernel...anyone has any idea about what it might be?

Funny thing about the HD on RH9
 

Hi,

Strange thing is even after upgrading the kernel, the casing was detected as 12mb/s, whereas it's 480mb/s !

A friend recommended mandrake 10.1, and I just installed it yesterday, and mandrake recognises the disk as 480mb/s straight off, with the 2.6 kernel !

A nostalgic goodbye to Redhat which I've been using since RH 7.1...

Regards, Ahsan

I have the same problem copying to a USB drive for long periods, but it eventually continues. It just how the vfat module works and maybe SCSI. Probably tweaking fs in the kernel settings using sysctl might help.

To get 480 Mb per second, you need to load ehci-hcd or ehci_hcd (depends on the distribution). The modules uhci, usb-uhci, ohci, and usb-ohci do not work any faster than 12 Mb per second although they are more stable than the ehci modules.

Hey

But my drive entirely stops (even the led light indicator on it goes dark).
Then I have to remount it to get it up again...doesn't matter if I wait for a long period of time.

HELP!