No USB 3.0 on Lenovo X1 Carbon [SOLVED]

boudie-san · Last edited by boudie-san on Wed Dec 28, 2022 12:57 am; edited 2 times in total

Hi Everyone, been a user of Gentoo Linux since 2004. Have to admit to being out of practice when
installing to my laptop, a 4th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. It was a lot tougher job than initially thought.
Attempting an Openbox desktop with no systemd or pulseaudio. Almost everything works but when
I try to mount a USB 3.0 external hard drive, it doesn't show up in Thunar. Trying udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb1
tells me sdb1 is not a mountable filesystem. Mount didn't work either, can't find filesystem. It's ext4.

The thing is, same drive mounts fine on my raspberry pi. And USB 2.0 drives pop right up in Thunar on the X1.
My brain hurts from trying to troubleshoot this one. Any help is appreciated.

Here is my emerge --info

http://dpaste.com//5RBPNTLYW

my kernel config

http://dpaste.com//6Q84F3PMU

var/log relevant output

http://dpaste.com//58FCD48F7

output of lsmod

http://dpaste.com//GPQQPK972

Just before doing the lsmod, did modprobe xhci_plat-hcd. Didn't help, just wanted to mention
it didn't load automatically.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 9:43 am Post subject:

boudie-san,

Welcome to the forums.

boudie-san · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 1:25 pm Post subject:

Thank you Neddy. Will be recompiling my kernel later today. There's a lot to
go through for this Intel Skylake platform, over 20 modules for the audio. My
eyesight was getting blurry after staring at menuconfig for 3 hours.

This is my first post but have been running Gentoo on all my computers since
2004. So of course, I've seen the name Neddy Seagoon. Must have read
hundreds of your posts. Wish I were half as smart as you. So thanks for your
answer, that sounds like the culprit. Thought you just needed that for UEFI/GPT
when I went BIOS/DOS. So it's not a USB 3.0 problem ... it's a GPT problem.

So thanks again for all the help you've given. Folks like me who could never
figure it all out on our own appreciate it.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 2:19 pm Post subject:

boudie-san,

There is a different knob in the kernel for EFI support, which you also have off.
You clearly don't need it with your setup, or your system would not boot.
You may find The Olde Way helps understanding of why we needed a new partition table.

I'm not really smart. I've been playing with computers for a long time and have been through most of the learning opportunities I see on the forums myself.
... and some others I don't :)

I know it as the school of hard knocks ... but that probably not PC.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

boudie-san · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 11:39 pm Post subject:

Hey Neddy, we can mark this one solved. Now the USB hard drive pops right up in Thunar.
Just changed CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION to =y, ran make oldconfig and it works.

I'll save that link for future reference. My opinion is to not make anything more complicated
than it needs to be. Simpler is better. And the less there is, the less there is to screw up.

Thanks for the help.

pietinger · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 11:46 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2022 12:22 pm Post subject:

boudie-san,

Don't ever use $EDITOR on the kernel .config file.
Some options flip about a dozen .config flags, some of which may be hidden.
You won't do that with $EDITOR atd you can end up with a badly broken kernel the likes of which, nobody has ever seen.

boudie-san · Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:01 pm Post subject:

Neddy, good point about not using an editor on .config file. Sorry for delayed response.
After trying to configure kernel with menuconfig from scratch, even with a list of modules
needed from the LiveGUI Gentoo image, it wasn't easy finding them. Hours were spent
finding what the module names converted to in the config file. Even tried using the config
scripts to add/delete items. With very mixed results.

My break came reading a Wiki article by Sakaki who suggested starting with a known working
config. So used the LiveGUI config (5.15 kernel also), ran menuconfig, removed a pile of stuff
not needed (including GPT, oops!). There's a ridiculous amount of hardware on this X1 Carbon.
Still lots of bloat ... don't need RAID for sure. But we'll keep working on it.

It's not quite the same as the first kernel configured, which was 2.2 on a PII desktop. Kid's play
by comparison. And maybe there's nothing to be gained today by doing it. Finally, the amount
of firmware in 2022 is mind blowing. I'm amazed every time it turns on.