I've got Slackware 10.1, and I've got an external HD that I hook up every so often. The other day I was dorking around in GIMP and tried to save my pic and - whoops! - I can't write to the drive. My non-storage USB devices (mouse and trackball) work just fine but my external HD and my flash USB drive ("thumb drive", as some people call it") don't. The flash drive never worked before as far as reading and writing, but it DID show up in /dev. Now neither my external HD or my thumb drive show up in /dev. They DO, however, show up in "lsusb" and /proc.

Any ideas? I did upgrade to the 2.6.12.3 kernel, but I also have this problem with the 2.6.10 kernel that comes with Slackware. Haven't tried the old 2.4 kernel, though.

Nope, doesn't work in 2.4 either. It must be a software issue then.

Well, if no one else knows what to do, then I'll just back up my files to my secondary INTERNAL HD and reinstall. I did updates recently, so maybe a new piece of software broke the system.

You have to mount the storage devices before using them. The USB storage devices will be under /dev/sda..../dev/sdz with the partition number. Look in the man pages for mount.

You can not bump your message before 24 hours.

I understand that. What I'm saying is that they've disappeared from /dev/. There is no /dev/sda, sda1, sdb. . . none of that. And I understand that one of the features in some of the 2.6 kernels uses /dev/uba, /dev/uba1, etc. However, there is absolutely nothing representative of my USB storage devices in /dev. It's there in /proc/scsi, though.

And I already did reinstall and, as I suspected, everything was OK until I ran system updates with swaret. That doesn't really solve anything, though, because I don't want to just never do system updates. I wasn't saying that I was going to "bump" my message, I was just saying that I was going to try and see if the updates were what caused the problem - I'd also installed other things and made other changes in between when I last had the other drive hooked up. Now that I know for sure the updates did it, I still have to figure out what software might do this and what to do about not being able to update it.

I fixed it!

If anyone else is having this problem, here's how I fixed it:
I went to /var/swaret and installed the devs package using "installpkg"

This puts special files in your /dev directory that are supposed to represent your system's hardware.
Then, I "cd"'d back to /dev and ran the MAKEDEV tool

If ub is enable in kernel version 2.6.x, you will have more problems. The ub module is useless. It is better to usb storage from SCSI.

You could use mknod to make the device node because that only works with Slackware. However udev should be making the devices.