I went to bed last night leaving Handbrake encoding a movie. It often takes three hours or more for it to complete, so I frequently let it run overnight. When I got up in the morning Handbrake had failed. A little checking revealed that the directory it was writing to (an external USB drive) was no longer mounted or even connected. That certainly explains why the encode failed, but why did it become unmounted?
The computer has two USB 3.0 ports in the back and two more on the right side. One of the ones in the back holds the receiver for the wireless mouse (still working), and the other holds a HooToo HT-UE01 3-port USB 3.0 hub with 1 Gigabit ethernet port (not working). The external drive that Handbrake was writing to (also not working) was connected to one of the HooToo ports. At first it appeared that the whole problem was that the HooToo had lost contact with the port it was connected to, but a little more checking revealed that the two ports on the right side (each containing a USB flash drive) were also not working.Yet the mouse receiver continued to work, and furthermore it continued to work when I put it in any of the other ports. I had no internet, in spite of the fact that the computer has both ethernet and wifi, and both were connected. The ethernet was plugged into the HooToo, so I didn't expect that to be working, but the wifi should still have been working. To get the net back I moved the ethernet from the HooToo to the ethernet jack on the computer, which restored the connection. Then I started searching for how to fix the mess, but put that aside when it occurred to me that the first priority was to back up the external drive that Handbrake had been writing to - because I still didn't know why or how it had become disconnected. (And I still don't as I write this.) Making the backup took a long time - not only did I have to get the source drive mounted again, but the NAS had also become unmounted and my first attempt wrote to the mount point instead of the NAS. Eventually I got back to searching the net for how to fix things. I discovered the lsusb command, which found all the ports as long as something was in the port. And after using lsusb all the ports went back to working, and the HooToo functioned perfectly again as well. But the big question remains: What the <expletive> happened? Power problems: My neighborhood is subject to occasional very short power failures - only a couple seconds, but enough to shut down a computer. Because of this I run everything off of three rather massive battery backups. And I mean everything, including all peripherals, including the drive that Handbrake was writing to, which has its own external power source. Physical issues: If something jiggled the connection it could have disconnected a device, but three of them on different sides of the computer? Plus this doesn't explain why they continued to fail to work even after I removed them one at a time and reseated them, or why the mouse receiver worked in any of the ports, but not the other devices - that is, until I used lsusb. And there is no explanation for why the NAS also became unmounted, since it isn't even connected to a USB port. I've got everything working again and there was no harm done, other than to what little sanity I have. But I am concerned and curious. Any comments and suggestions are welcome, and thanks for reading the saga of my scary day. :) _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
