Hello,

I have a very new Dell (Pentium 4 machine) here at work dual booted with Redhat 7.3 and Windows 2000.
I'm trying to get an external USB Zip 250 drive to work in Linux but am not having any luck so far.
I've tried:

modprobe usb-storage
mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip

and that didn't work, giving the error message:
mount: /dev/sda4 is not a valid block device

So then I unplugged the Zip drive, and ran:

tail -f /var/log/messages

when I plugged it back in, the messages popped up:

hub.c: Cannot enable port 4 of hub 1, disabling port
hub.c: Maybe the USB cable is bad?

Now, despite the kernel's deductive reasoning, I know the cable is just fine because the drive works OK in Windows 2000 on the same machine. I tried plugging it into all 8 of the USB ports on the computer, and basically got the same results, just varying port numbers.

Any suggestions?

thanks, Mike

/dev/sda4 is the default for the old parrallels and true scsi devices... the last time I played with a USB one I think it got good old /dev/sda1, what's the rest of the scsi device scan say?

Cheers,

Finegan

I am running Red Hat 7.3 and am having a very similar problem w/ getting a usb storage device to work (in my case, a usb flash drive). I get the same "Cannot enable port # of hub 1, disabling port." error (where # varies according to where i'm plugged in at the moment).

As far as using /dev/sda1 vs. /dev/sda4, the number relates to the paritions (1 is the first partition, 2 is the second, etc.). Hence, I don't think that is an issue.

Again, this port, device, and cable all work fine under windoze, so I think this is a bigger issue.

Maybe this why I can't get my USB printer to work either... (of course, I am using a USB mouse w/ no problems, and plugged the device into the same controller.)