SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS Archives

March 2008

SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS@LISTSERV.FNAL.GOV

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Marco DELMASTRO <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Marco DELMASTRO <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:58:41 +0100
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (53 lines)
Hello all,

Since a few weeks I'm using an external usb disk (Western Digital 
Passport 250 Gb, usb powered, VFAT file system to allow compatibility 
with other-than-linux OSs...) and I'm experiencing some weird problems.

On my laptop running SL 5.1 (actually 5.x updated to the latest 
releases) everythong is fine, the disk is recognized as /dev/sda1 and 
(auto)mounted by autofs on "/media/WD\ Passport". Every standard 
operation (moving, copying, deleting) is fine, data access is ok.
Here I currently have autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.55.el5.2, and kernel is 
2.6.18-53.1.14.el5.

On my desktop machine (AMD 64 Athlon X2) running SL CERN 4.x (again the 
latest, corresponding to 4.6) the same disk is recongnize as /dev/sdb1 
and (auto)mounted on "/media/usbdisk". Now the problems starts: I can cd 
on the volume and see the content with ls, but any other more complex 
operation (e.g. find or mv, cp, rm, ...) hangs forever, cannot be 
aborted or killed, and I cannot unmount the volume anymore. Even 
shutdown is impossible, since apparently the autofs deamon cannot be 
stopped, and I have to switch off power to get the machine back! Here I 
have autofs-4.1.3-231, and kernel is 2.6.9-67.0.4.EL.cernsmp (yep, I 
know, not a vanilla SL kernel, but still...). dmesg says nothing strange:

usb 1-6: new high speed USB device using address 3
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
   Vendor: WD        Model: 2500BEA External  Rev: 1.04
   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sdb: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdb: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
  sdb: sdb1
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi4, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
USB Mass Storage device found at 3
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
SELinux: initialized (dev sdb1, type vfat), uses genfs_contexts

Any clue of what could it be? Who's to be blamed? autofs? the kernel? 
the insufficient USB power? Any additional information I could provide?

Thanks in advance, M.

P.S. cross-posting to CERN linux mailing list, maybe they know more...
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------
Marco DELMASTRO               Office:        40-1-D08
CERN PH (ATLAS)                Phone: +41 22 767 4831
CH-1211 Geneve 23 Switzerland    Fax: +41 22 767 8350
-----------------------------------------------------

ATOM RSS1 RSS2