What follows happened on a fresh cooker installation. The short story is: /dev entries were not added when I connected a hard drive to the usb bus, they were not removed when I disconnected the device, new /dev entries were not created when I added a different drive to the usb port.
My question is: Should I file this as a kernel-bug or a devfs bug in bugzilla? Which one, then? The full story is: 1) I connected hard drive A to the usb port, it's an IDE in a IDE->USB enclosure case. Nothing happened. I.e. no desktop icons appeared, no /dev/sd* entries appeared. 2) I ran modprobe usb-storage, nothing happened. 3) I ran harddrake2 and lo and behold, a desktop icon appeared as well as /dev/sda and /dev/sda1. [ok, I admit that I keep forgetting what other modules I may need to modprobe ... but harddrake2 and diskdrake both manage to do that for me]. However, the partition type of /dev/sda1 was misdetected as vfat instead of ext3 so I had to unmount the drive and remount with -t ext3. 4) I worked with the drive for a while, unmounted it and disconnected it from the usb bus. 5) >>After the drive had been removed, the desktop icon stayed put and the /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 entries stayed<< Of course the expected behaviour was for all of these to disappear. 6) I connected hard drive B to the usb port, but all that was shown in /dev were the old entries. I tried to launch diskdrake and it warned me that the drive was unreadable and suggested perhaps to reformat it ! 7) >> Only when I rmmod-ed usb-storage and modprobe-d it again did the correct entries appear in /dev, i.e. /dev/sda, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda5.<< What I expected: The correct entries to appear as soon as I connected the drive to the usb bus. 8) The /dev entries and the desktop icon of course remained after I disconnected the drive. Narfi.
