USB problems

[Dennis Kibbe]

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.

You might start by plugging a device one USB device only (except the vaccum) 
and running dmesg from the command line.  At the end of the text there should 
be something that tells you that the device was seen by hotplug and, if it's 
a drive, a device name should be assigned, most likely sda1.

If you get a device name, but it doesn't mount (or show up on the Desktop) 
then I guess that there isn't a mountpoint being created for some reason.

If that happens try restarting hotplug or using YAST to search for new 
hardware.  You could also run most any modern Live-CD and it should recognize 
the device right away if the hardware was OK.

Dennisk