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...
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