Hi,

There have been reports of SuSE 9.1 having problems mounting USB Flash Drives.

All of the other improvements in SuSE 9.1 have been negated by the poor support for USB flash drives, a feature which was working perfectly in version 9.0.

I have configured my desktop to show all mounted devices. When the USB drive is inserted, after two or three minutes a hard drive icon for the /sda1 device appears. Right-clicking open leads to a blank Konquorer window. Unplugging and replugging the drive on occasions allows the drive to mount - except another desktop icon appears for the USB drive this two presents an empty window. Trying to unmount the USB drive returns a "The drive is busy" message.

After a restart may when the USB drive is in place, SuSE 9.1 halts at the hardware detection phase as it tries to read the USB flash drive. I gave it 20 minutes. The only way to allow the boot to continue is to remove the USB flash drive.

As someone who is constantly moving data between Macs on OS 9 and X, Windows 95, 98 and XP, NetWare servers and Linux boxes, I need every OS to work with my USB drive without issues. SuSE 9.1 cannot do this. I may be missing something really obvious, but this failure has really taken the shine of the excitment of getting 9.1. I have in fact returned to 9.0 until I can find a solution to this irritation.

Any comments, links, pointers, or assistance gratefully received.

Regards,

dkpw

Thanks for the heads up. My 9.1 is due shortly.
Unless you also posted to alt.os.linux.suse at least one other person has reported this also.
Are you able to access the drive from the command line?

Hi 2damncommon,

Sorry I cannot say whether the USB flash drive was accessible from the command line - I didn't try that. I must confess I was so annoyed that it was not working as smoothly as in SuSE 9.0 that I reinstalled 9.0.

I'm in the lucky position of having a new T41 to test things out on and I want them to be 100% before I even think of going near my other SuSE box which is running Apache, ProFTPD, MySQL etc. etc..

The USB drive did sometimes mount, but only after several minutes of effort on the part of T41. Generally I would have to unplug and replug it a couple of times. KDE seemed to struggle to keep up with this and would then scatter HD icons over the desktop. As I said if you rebooted with the flash drive in place, the boot would get to the hardware detection phase and sit.

All in all this is just too unreliable.

dkpw

Just installed Suse 9.1.
You are right,dkpw, something is a little wacky with the USB access. After plugging in my USB drive, 4 different windows started up (and may have kept starting) until I clicked cancel on all but one. When I clicked to view the files on the device I received a failed to enter folder message. On a second attempt I had 2 konqueror windows open up with that error.
Manually mounting the USB drive works fine..
I will keep an eye out on instructions to fix the bug or disable the autodetect.

Hi 2damncommon,

Since my first post I have had some more time to muck about and I reinstalled 9.1 on my ThinkPad. This time things are working a lot better.

The USB drive still takes a time to mount and I generally have to plug it in, out, then in once more. This time I changed the desktop configuration not to show mounted removable drives and so I no longer have countless failed mount Konquorer windows everywhere.

One difference on this install is I have a "My Computer" icon on the Desktop. I did not consciously set this. But opening this in Konquorer shows the USB flash drive as a hard drive icon. It now opens after a couple of goes. I still have problems booting if the USB drive is plugged in - the hardware detection cannot get past it!?

I am happier now though and am pleased to see that SuSE are making many security updates available for 9.1 although I will give it some more time before upgrading my SuSE 9.0 server.

Regards

dkpw

Is your USB drive USB1 or USB2? I noticed that my old USB1 drive appears to be OK but my USB2 drive exhibits the same problem as yours (4 drives appear etc).

The USB2 drive does have some additional features on it, for Windows users, to allow additional security (under windows it appears as a floppy drive and as a removable drive) and I am wondering if this is what the problem might be.

Is it possible to remove the broken links to the USB drive that are created under "my computer"? (sorry real newbie)

Thanks

Hi,

My USB drve is a 256MB USB 1 Crucial Gizmo. I have found that after plugging in the drive it takes an age (between 2- 5 minutes) to appear in the "My Computer " section under 9.1 BUT it does appear. I cannot see why it should take that much time, but it does. Thereafter it works properly, until the drive is removed when you have to take another 2-3 minutes for it to mount once more.

Regards

dkpw

P.S. When trying the Linuxant drivers for the wireless card in my T41 a side-effect was that no USB devices were detected under SuSE 9.1 with the Linuxant drivers installed and active (but not working). In my case this meant no mouse, no USB flash drive and no Canon G1 digital camera. So the USB flakiness of SuSE 9.1 continues.

I am experiencing pretty much the same difficulties with my Lexar usb memory stick. I have downloaded all recent patches for SuSE 9.1 to my IBM thinkpad. The behavior seems a bit better after I updated but not by much. It used to be that nothing happened now it will sometimes be recognized after a few minutes (anywhere from 3 - 10 minutes), but smetimes not at all. It seems it is being recognized as a hard drive as file:/media/usb-storage-F243270815020:0:0:0p1

The behavior of the drive seems to change every time I use it. Now it will show up, sometimes, and then after a period of time it just seems to die. When it does show up the drive opens in Konqerour so you can see all of the files and work with them. However, after a relatively shor period of times the files are no longer available to use even though they are still visible. Also Konqerour will lock up. I have also noticed that my mouse seems to be a bit erratic and "jumpy."

I am not 100% percent sure it is related but when I tried syncing my USB palm from the command line the device could not be found. I have not tried working with the USB drive from the command line because I have had a hard time pin pointing how SuSE is now recognizing it, and am unfamiliar with the way the new kernel handles USB. Under older distributions it was sda1, and you could put an entry into the etc/fstab file and it would work great - no problems. I am using KDE but I doubt if that makes any difference.

I am seeing a lot of comments on different news groups about this problem.

I have a Lexar 256MB USB2.0 and it always mounts three mount-points on SuSE 9.1, /dev/sda[1-3], none of which actually works. Annoyed with this, I just do a manual mount of the device with 'mount /dev/sda /jumpdrive' and it works fine. Just have to remember to unmount it before unplugging....

ok when I plug in my usb drive its like its not even aware its there. Editing the fstab made not difference...

Right clicking the hardware icon in the system tray, I looked for usb and found on one of the tabs that the daemon is not running; they recommended doing a modprobe uhcd ....yada yada as root, then usb on the whole works

Thats rather annoying. Isn't there a file I can add this to (like where to set dma to be on, so it runs the command on bootup) ???

And yes I got the cannot open device in X with an access denied in kde as well.

This is the first time I'm using SuSE and it great except for this unexpected hiccup....

NOTE: See my post further down. This did work but stopped the next time I booted up and I am editing this post to just ad this note.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Okay here is the solution. The usual disclaimers, and this is what works under SuSE 9.1:

Either su into root or loginto root to make the following changes:

1. From the command line type: mkdir dev/usb This creates a mount point.
2. Go to etc/fstab and make the following entry (provided you are using a pen drive that is vfat formatted and not something else - which is most likely the case):

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat noauto,users,rw 0 0

Now, if you are using KDE you just have a few simple steps in order to make a nice little desktop icon:

1. Right click on the desktop and choose "Create New Device" it really does not matter what kind of device because you will make a choice from a drop down menu in the next step.
2. You have four tabed choices: General, Permissions, Device, and Meta Info. Choose Device and there will be a drop down menu with everything listed in the etc/fstab. You will notice that dev/sda1 is now available, it was not earlier, because you have just put it into the etc/fstab file and since this is not windows you do not even have to reboot! The choice you want is of course dev/sda1.
3. You can change the name and stuff under properties but that is it.

I just went through this and it is working for me.

I have not tracked down what the problem is but it seems that it has something to do with some sort of automount feature either in the distribution or KDE. However, I have had no problems with any other kind of device, including a cd burner that works great, except USB.

Now if I could just figure out how to get my Tungsten Palm to sync. I suspect it is somewhat related but who knows. At least in Linux you can get under the hood and figure things out.

well actually I did do that but the problem is that my ohci-hcd driver is not being activated on boot.

I have to manually do as root 'modprobe ohci-hcd' to start up the driver.

I'm still looking as a means to do this.

Yeah it is still messed up and I thought I had found a solution. Now I get a message that it is not a valid block device. My post earlier, I added a note, was premature. When I booted back up it no longer work. I am baffled. At this point I REALLY think something is broken either in the distro, the kernel or something.

I followed your, Mr_C's directions, and the drive would be found, I would no longer get the message that it was no longer a valid block device, but my keyboard will freeze sometimes and at other times it seems to take three minutes or longer to display the contents.

I am going to keep working on this though and checking back because like many of you I really do depend on the USB pen drive to move data back and forth and to particular switch between operating systems.

ok whenever I create a device it mounts it and always says disk is full. Shell works great.

to get it to load the driver module by default make a startup script in your /etc/init.d

eg
vi /etc/init.d/loadmyusb

which contains
/sbin/modprobe ohci-hcd

save and exit

then do a chmod +x /etc/init.d/loadmyusb
to make it executable.
Now go to the yast init editor and add 'loadmyusb' to the appropriate run levels (1,2,3,5)


Have fun.

I am having a similar issue. I have a Lexar 256M usb drive. When I plug it in is automounts to something similar to /media/usb-storage-33000000805000024434:0:0:0p1 I want to know if there is a way to tell it NOT to automount, and how I can specify where it auto mounts to.