I've seen this in debian too.
mostly, its the USB interface and the driver handling it.
if you pull that drive and plug it into an IDE slot somewhere and mount it, it
should come up just fine (after a brief but necessary check of the
filesystem).
I distrust USB for large block devices (USB isn't exactly "mature" yet).
the possibilities are:
1. disk crash (unlikely, but can occur)
2. USB interface on the external drive b0rked (very likely)
3. USB interface on the computer flaky or dieing (also likely)
4. driver for USB subsystem may need to be re-installed or recompiled (driver
corrupted).
recommend you upgrade to the latest OpenSuse too as the kernel version for 9.2
had some quirks that could result in this.
one last point. BEFORE you upgrade the OS, make damned sure you are not
running the promise chipset anywhere on the machine. libata (especially for
SATA and scsi drives) was broken in later revisions of Suse 9.3 and they have
yet to properly address the situation even in 10.1.
the above is based on personal experience with USB devices and SATA drives of
late.
On Sunday 01 October 2006 09:49, Lynn David Newton wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I think there's something wrong with the USB bus on my
> computer, but I'm looking for a clearer explanation.
>
> The system is a home constructed AMD64 running SuSE
> 9.2, about a year and a half old. Has never given me a
> lick of trouble.
>
> Symptoms:
>
> o One day I rebooted my computer and found that I could
> not mount my external 160GB drive. fsck would not do
> anything. At first it was giving me a bad superblock
> message. Not good, but sometimes symptomatic of less
> than the worst possible scenario, namely a disk
> crash. Right now fsck says it's not a valid block
> device. The node is in fact a block device.
> Presumably its not being a "valid" one is determined
> by trying to access the physical device and not
> finding it.
>
> o I also have a generic card reader on the bus to read
> my digital camera's SD cards. The green light doesn't
> even come on. I pulled it off and threw it on the
> Mac, where it worked fine. This suggests maybe the
> external drive is okay, and that there's a bus
> problem.
>
> o The external drive is hanging off a port on the back
> of the system. (I tried moving it to the second one
> with no improvement.) The card reader is off a port
> on the front.
>
> o lsusb
> Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
> Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
> Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
> Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
>
> Looks kinda like nothing's there, eh?
>
> But wait, there's more:
>
> o I have a gizmo on the bus -- a USB powered keyboard
> vacuum[1] -- and it gets power and whirs away, doing
> what it's supposed to do to the best of its inept
> ability when I push the buttons. So at least there's
> power coming through.
>
> I'm not sure what to do from here. Suggestions?
>
> Footnotes:
> [1] Close to worthless, if you've been considering
> buying one.
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