On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Dazed_75 <lthielster@gmail.com> wrote:

NOTE: Before anyone spends serious effort on this, I have resolved the problem. Now I would just like to understand what happened.

Today I formatted a flash drive to ext3 (in ubuntu 9.04) and copied some files to it to save them from a clean install. Yes, I did a safely remove (or clean unmount) before removing the drive. Having completed the clean install of ubuntu 9.10, I went to restore the files.

The zen of troubleshooting; the question is the answer:

Upon insertion, the flash drive did not appear and (the indicator light on the flash drive continued to blink for a LONG time).

If the indicator did not light, it was not getting sufficient contact to work. All of the dmesg output indicates a partial connection, i.e. an I/O error.

Sometimes when you plug in a USB drive, it does not light. Some of the older ones break down inside and don't connect without messing with them, taping them, etc.

When I tried to navigate to it with nautilus (it did show the drive by name) I got an error dialog which said:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail or so

That means that it could not mount it due to exit code 32.
There are a great deal of other people having these problems in various distros including Window$ and Mac -- I would contact Kingston with these questions.

There are some bug tracking issues on Ubuntu also, you might look there?

Here is the relevant stuff from dmesg:

[ 1466.000055] usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
[ 1466.163107] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 1466.171337] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[ 1466.171541] scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[ 1466.171612] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[ 1466.171614] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[ 1466.171682] usb-storage: device found at 3
[ 1466.171684] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[ 1471.170407] usb-storage: device scan complete
[ 1471.200772] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[ 1471.201116] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 1472.859134] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 7827456 512-byte logical blocks: (4.00 GB/3.73 GiB)
[ 1472.859624] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 1472.859628] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 1472.859631] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1472.862636] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1472.862641] sdb: sdb1
[ 1472.906121] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1472.906124] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 1565.015001] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 3
[ 1565.015138] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
[ 1565.015142] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 1565.015147] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 1488943
[ 1565.015153] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 186110
[ 1565.015156] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
[ 1565.015180] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
[ 1565.015183] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 1565.015187] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 3564287
[ 1565.015190] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 445528
[ 1565.015193] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
[ 1565.015207] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 445529
[ 1565.015208] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
[ 1565.015210] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 445530
[ 1565.015212] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
[ 1565.015481] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
[ 1565.015483] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 1565.015485] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 1956879
[ 1565.015487] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 244602
[ 1565.015489] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
[ 1565.020036] JBD: recovery failed
[ 1565.020039] EXT3-fs: error loading journal.
larry@triggerfish:~$
Strangely, when I tried the flash drive on my laptop (which just happened to be running 9.10 from a LiveCD), the drive blinked for quite a while and then opened normally. I did another safe remove from there and tried it again in the desktop where it mounted normally and quickly. I have NOT checked all the files.

Now the only thing I can think of is that for an unknown reason the original write had some kind of error and the thing got recovered in the end by the journaling system on one of these machines but that took time. If true, I would have expected some kind of notification but did not get any. Oh, BTW, the dmesg output on the laptop stopped after the equivalent of the [1472.906124] message above.

--
Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
- Thomas Jefferson

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