Hi guys.
I have a tiny USB SSD which I wanted to use to boot different Live systems from.
It has 2 "devices" inside (LUNs), one - read only 3 mib CD-drive and one - main memory.
The main memory is split into 2 partitions - fat32 (16gb) and exFat (empty, 100 gb).

Unfortunately, GParted, Kali and Knoppix weren't able to start from it. They all stuck on some udev/disk related moments.

Then I started up GParted from another USB stick, then connected the USB-SSD and ran smartctl. Which... simply hanged forever. Every access to /dev/sdb resulted in a hanging.

Question: are there "USB memory devices" totally unsupported by Linux kernel?
Or am I missing something?

Please advise, for I'd really love to run some Linux off this USB-SSD stick. Thank you!

What is the make and model number of this drive?

Not many usb drives are supported by smartctl so that is not necessarily a problem. Yes there are usb drives not totally supported by linux and hybrid drives typically are mostly not.

I use no USB SSD drives (for good reason) so I cannot comment on that.
I use a LOT of USB Thumb drives (which use SD not SSD tech).
I have had some fail after heavy use, but I have never had one fail to work under Linux.
I have three I carry every day: one holds only data and portable software, the other two hold different collections of ISO files for diagnostic work, live sessions, and installation of Windows or Linux as needed. They are loaded with Ventoy to manage the boot, and seem to work with almost everything.

Your device sounds quite different from anything I use. Can you https://laslindas.kemono.cafe/comic/dive-in/provide more detail about it?

Thanks for being so active guys! I really want to figure this out so I will provide whatever is needed!

The USB SSD is a pretty new one (2023 I believe).

Sonizoon PSSD USB3.2 based on SM2258XT chipset. It has a fingerprint scanner (at first I thought the problem is due to FP introducing a huge delay, but it's possible yo disable it and so I did - and nothing changed at all).

I have tried it on several computers, everywhere the situation is the same.

Android works fine with it (although doesn't recognise the CD LUN)
Windows says the drive is SCSI USB
HWinfo lists the drive under SATA/ATA section

Most linuxes are stuck in the very beginning of booting with something like Timed out for waiting udev queue become empty.

The USB definition is just a crap-shoot. I had a network dongle show up as a hard disk - hmmm. Turns out that was what it was configured as - on Windoze it held an installer that ran automagically and reconfigured the dongle as ... (you guessed it !!) a network adapter.

Just shows you should be real careful pugging in USBs you find laying about - or even from vendors. The specifications are a load of drivel.

The CD part contains the finger print software which is I assume Windows only, one partition is for private data and the other is for public data as I understand. I don't know if the drive is bootable.

Most installers will try to overwrite the drive entirely which probably can't happen because the cd is protected. I don't know about the others or if you can split the public part into more then one partition. I would assume not.

I would get a regular USB flash disk and use this one just for data.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have a NVMe SSD in a USB3 enclosure. For the most part, it behaves as a regular storage device. smartctl seems to have no problem automatically recognizing the actual SSD in the enclosure. parted sees the correct capacity, but only sees the enclosure's properties. The nvme command doesn't recognize the device as an NVMe drive.

One issue I see is that there is probably a number of pcie lanes normally driving an nvme. But usb is a serial connection, and the caddy has usb<-->sata controller which is now usb<-->nvme. It s h o u l d work, but no guarantees.

I know nothing of any incompatibility with usb drives. SSD or spinning rust in a decent caddy is no issue, unless you're trying to boot from it.

Post what 'lsusb -v' makes of it, including the hex identifier. The kernel chooses the driver from there.

Regarding the partitions. The SSD identifies itself as two physical usb devices, one for CD and one for the main memory. The main memory was manually splitted to 2 logical partitions, one for boot stuff and one for data.
The boot partition has GRUB2.
It works fine loading all kinds of Windows including XP.
This topic was created to try and somehow solve the problem. The "use another flash" approach is pretty obvious and I do use it

Regarding "lsusb" - I will try and let you know.

Thanks to all of you for your attention!

Here you go, the extract from "lsusb -v" related to my SSD.
As you can see, it has 2 interface descriptors.

What I noticed is bInterfaceProtocol 98, meaning this is a UAS device.
I can see on Internet that there are many problems with booting Linux from an UAS device. Any solutions yet?

As usual, I had to figured out and fix everything myself.

The solution is to add a usb-storage quirk to the Grub2 config file. Seems that the uas support in Linux is pretty bad in terms of anything exotic, in this case - having a vitual CDROM on the same scsi bus.

You often have to figure things out yourself, especially with pretty unusual equipment which none of us probably have. We volunteer our help, but we are not paid.

Now idioms translated into another language often change in meaning. Perhaps it's a language issue, but it comes across that you're not grateful for the efforts of others to help you. That doesn't encourage anyone to help you henceforth. It seems you only registered for this thread, and gave little information on the problem areas in your box. You're no linux newbie, but as a forum newbie, have you read this?

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