Hi,

Right I have installed Umbuntu 6.10 (edgy) by the old fashioned sledgehammer approach of disconnecting the other drives so there was no way that the installer could put grub onto them. Then I reconnected. turns out that Umbuntu is seeing my sata drive as hd0 and the ide one as hd1. even though they are detected the other way around in the Bios!

I now have a problem with usb pen drives not being detected. I have checked the admin section and all the right boxes are ticked. But when I plug in a drive. Nothing. Zilch.

The drives are vfat formatted and work happily under Suse and Mandriva (they are displayed on the desktop) so why not Umbuntu? I know nothing about the hotplug system and don't even know where to begin other lsusb. This produces 3 devices when I've only plugged two drives in.

Anyone any ideas where I can even start?

John.

with the usb device not plugged in already, plug it in then post the output of 'dmesg | tail' you may have to run this command with sudo.

if all goes well it should display the device file the USB drive is using, say, /dev/sda1 for example. then use the mount command to mount this device to a previously-created directory, such as 'mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbPen -t vfat -o rw'

nodraj approach should work but truth is you shouldn't have to do any mounting if you have a valid install. No end to devices with storage should mount automatically. An appropriate icon should pop up on the desk top. Clicking the icon takes you into Nautilus. You will probably asked with a pop up if you want to download pictures. You just click ignore if your treating the media as another disk. You clearly have some configuration that has gone south. You need not unplug drives since you select the partitions used for the install. I think you had an installation problem.

I did wonder if something had gone wrong on install. Problem is that I am not a strong user so have no idea where to even start looking. Could you give me some pointers?

J.

we have both suggested methods. tell us what part you are stuck on exactly, thanks

Ok here goes. Although dmesg|tail does give the relevent info for manually mounting a drive. This is a pain. Particularly if you have to do it every time you plug a pen drive or other usb drive in. Also I tried it with an ide drive in an external usb housing. dmesg|tail showed it as sdf: sdf1 sdf2 sdf3 <sdf5 sdf6>. But mount /dev/sdf5 -t ext3 /media/linux2 produced an error 'no such device sdf5'.

You're correct in that the hotplug system *should* pick drive up automatically and it does, provided...

There are no other usb devices plugged in, such as a printer or usb mouse.

I've only just discoved the above after a lot of trial and error. If any other usb device is plugged in then I get a repeating error in the logs, can't remember exact details (not currently on the linux box) but it's along the lines of 'device bla bla cannot accept address at something'. Hotplug then just sulks and refuses to accept any usb drives.

This is a real pain since my printer is a usb device. So I cannot print and have a usb drive installed. Strangely if I remove the printer then dmesg|tail reports lpt0 removed. So its recognised correctly (?) but still causes hotplug to sulk.

I confess that I haven't tried a manual mount without other usb devices selected as, well the usb drives mount and there's no point.

So the pointers I need involve debugging the hotplug trail and finding out why plugging any usb device in other than a drive causes the whole hotplug system to sulk. Initially I need to know where the heck umbuntu puts it. /etc/init.d/ does not contain hotplug so I can't even start/stop the service.

Hope you can point me in the right direction.

John.

Your install is working in very strange ways. Not the expert, I'd consider a clean install. For what its worth there are rules that have some control over device startup. For example I had to add a rule for my Palm PDA cradle which is USB. These rules are found in /etc/udev/rules.d but I suspect you have a larger problem.