Re: Help diagnosing USB disk issue?

[Brian Flaherty <bxf4@yahoo.com>]

Thank you all for your thoughts about the USB disk problems I'm
having. I follow-up below.

Kelly wrote:
> Have you tried it on different ports?

Yes and no change.

> Do other USB devices (flash drives, keyboard/mouse, etc) work in the
> port(s) you are trying this disk on?

Yes.

> What do you get from lsusb, both plugged in and not?

No difference, a list of the other USB devices.


sp113438 asked if I tried usbmount. I believe usbmount and pmount are
both wrappers for regular users to mount removable drives. I use
pmount and it cannot mount anything because the kernel doesn't see the
drive. I tried to mount the device it should be, but as expected, the
kernel said it couldn't find that device.


Amit wrote:
> Try the following:
> 
> 1. blacklist uhci-hcd and usbhid in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.
>     - This forces ehci-hcd to load first.
> 2. Then once the system is up, manually modprobe uhci-hcd.

On my system, uhci-hcd wasn't loaded, only ehci-hcd. I tried this on
one system today and when I insmod'ed uhci-hcd without ehci_hcd, I
received a message that ehci_hcd has to be loaded first, and it was
loaded automatically.

Jude mentioned updating the usb-ids, but as another poster said, I
think that just updates the information about devices, not the
drivers.


Pascal wrote:
> If nothing shows in the kernel logs and other USB device work well, then
> it looks like a hardware issue to me, maybe a lack of power. Is the disk
> self-powered (with its own power adapter) or bus-powered ?

The external drive in question has its own power supply. Since it
works on the other computers, I assume it is getting enough power, but
the laptop it isn't working on is the newest. I suppose it is possible
that the newer X201 has a more sensitive USB hardware system.


I have since copied the stuff I wanted to put on the drive via rsync
across machines, rather than using one computer with two external
drives. I suspect the drive is the problem and that the older machines
are less picky about everything working right.

Thank you again!

Brian