[SOLVED] USB Flash drive not detected correctly

[DigitalCorpus]

In case anyone else has the particular drive, it is an 8GB SuperTalent DH flash drive. Works fine under the boot CD, but under my installation it is listed as a 2 GB drive from en entirely different manufacturer.

Don't know what config info you guys need so please ask and I'll provide. Thanks in advance

[frostschutz]

Don't plug the USB drive in yet.

Boot the Linux boot CD. Wait until everything is loaded and settled. Check dmesg. Plug the USB drive in, wait 30 seconds. Check dmesg again. Paste here the messages that were added since you plugged the drive in.

Same procedure with your installation. Boot, wait, check dmesg, plug in, wait, check dmesg again, paste the messages that were added in your installation.

Comparing the two that should be identical should give us at least some clue as to what is going wrong.

In general, for USB flash drive support, you need support in your kernel for USB storage as well as SCSI disk. This should get you going for standard hardware, unfortunately there are some that do not completely adhere to standards, or are buggy in some way, and they need some extra options in the kernel (support for special drives and brands and devices in the USB section, or in some rare cases multi lun support in the SCSI section).

[DigitalCorpus]

LiveCD:

[DigitalCorpus]

*bump*
So I guess I'm on m own after that. My searches haven't turned up anything so I was hoping to learn how to diagnose the problem here and solve it. still essentially a complete n00b.

[blueflame]

Try running 'lsusb' (emerge usbutils) and see what it tells you. eg.

[frostschutz]

You seem to have USB verbose debugging enabled in your kernel, there's no need for that unless you experience hangs (2.6.26 kernel has an issue there with some devices, it's fixed in 2.6.27).

The problem with your kernel is, I guess, the "unexpectedly short transfer" message, anyway it seems to be asking the device about it's capacity and all it gets back is some zeroes, so you got a device with 0 sectors each 0 bytes in size. This really sucks.

Which kernel versions are being used, on the LiveCD, and on your own system? If your systems kernel is older than the LiveCD, take the most recent kernel from kernel.org (2.6.26.3 or whatever).

Also, you could issue an lsmod on the LiveCD when your drive is plugged in, just to see if there are any additional USB storage modules loaded.

[DigitalCorpus]

Sorry for the delay, never saw your last post there. I'm running 2.6.26 on my system. I have to double check the version on the livecd, but it is 2.6.24 or 25 iirc.

Edit: The livecd, sorry, minimal cd I've been using has a a kernel version of 2.6.25 patched for reiser4.

[DigitalCorpus]

Think I might have some more insight as to the issue. When I got these I forgot I did somethign special. I formatted them under Windows (before overwriting it with Gentoo) so it would have larger clusters, 16KB or 64KB, can't recall. That is so I'd have a less of a problem with small files and the limitiations of NAND flash. benchmarks showed a reasonable increase so I left as is. The partition table is far from the norm as a result

Here is fdisk's output:

[frostschutz]

I only just noticed, but the dmesg you posted earlier, the LiveCD shows an 80GB drive not 8GB. Are you sure this wasn't a completely different device you saw in the Live?

That partition table looks broken, you should kill it (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourdrive bs=1M count=1) and then create a new one (preferably with cfdisk). Naturally when you do this you lose all your data on yourdrive, so make a backup first (if you can access it at all).

[DigitalCorpus]

Drive reformatted. Absolutely positive of the device that I plugged in and it's dmesg. I've done a lot of trimming the fat in my kernel config (down to 1641KB) so it isn't the same anymore. Though it is the same, here is a dmesg from my current kernel. Now it shows up at sda because my system boots faster when using the JMicron ATA driver that it does with the JMicron PATA/SATA driver (GA-965P-DS3 motherboard). It looks like I've missed a part in copyinging both dmesg's so here are new ones


System dmesg (I've cut out the repeating stuff ande labeled as such):

[DigitalCorpus]

I did some alternate searches with the hardware name I've seen from the LiveCD and on my PowerBook, AU_USB20, and found this thread from google:
http://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-testing/msg71407.html

When should we be expecting 2.6.27 in Gentoo?
_________________
Atlas (HDTV PVR, HTTP & Media server)
http://mobrienphotography.com/

[frostschutz]

You can get the 2.6.27 release candidate directly from www.kernel.org, no need to wait for it in Gentoo. However that is only a release candidate, not a release, so there is a chance of it carrying some bugs.

EDIT: there actually are already ebuilds for the 2.6.27 release candidates in Gentoo (sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-2.6.27*), but naturally they're keyworded AND masked. So you'd have to add entries for them in your package.keywords and package.unmask.

[DigitalCorpus]

Never had time to grab it and do it myself. Ebuild for reiser4 patches released today and everything is fine.
_________________
Atlas (HDTV PVR, HTTP & Media server)
http://mobrienphotography.com/