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General Support - USB flash drive woes

jdb2 - 27.10.2007, 22:18 Uhr
Titel: USB flash drive woes

Hello. I've been using the latest release of Kanotix for the past week or so due to my Windows machine being compromised by a rootkit ( I'm posting from said machine right now in Kanotix ) and I can say that's it's been the best Linux Live-CD experience I've had yet. Unfortunately there are some disappointments/problems that have arisen, specifically w.r.t using the persistent home directory feature and saving my config on a USB flash drive. When the drive is first plugged in or is already plugged in in a fresh Kanotix boot (no persistent home dir etc.) everything seems fine. The drive shows up on my Desktop as "TRAVELDRIVE" which would be consistent with the brand and model which is 256MB Memorex TravelDrive . When I attempt to set up a persistent home directory and save my config by clicking on "KANOTIX->Configure->Save KANOTIX configuration" everything seems to go well. Then when I select "KANOTIX->Configure->Create persistent KANOTIX home directory" and I choose the "SDC1" device which has been assigned to the flash drive, everything again appears to work fine until the operation is complete. After that, my drive disappears from the desktop, and after further inspection, I find that it is no longer mounted. Upon rebooting and using the boot options "myconfig=scan" and "home=scan" and when in X I see that my flash drive is still missing/unmounted and furthermore my settings have not been restored nor has my home directory been saved and restored. Furthermore, I receive errors to the effect (sorry I can't remember the exact messages) "KDED is not running" and "DBUS is not running" .

So, I've decided to do some further inspection. Following the instructions per this web page :
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11637.html?rnd=487905.77508360345
I run into some problems. First "lsusb" hangs. Secondly "dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device" produces :
"
[ 63.826565] SCSI subsystem initialized
[ 69.148736] scsi0 : sata_sil
[ 69.148798] scsi1 : sata_sil
[ 70.321205] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3160811AS 3.AA PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 70.321330] scsi 1:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3160811AS 3.AA PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 71.122104] scsi 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[ 71.122146] scsi 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 171.355653] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
[ 171.383534] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk "

with no mention of anything resembling a flash drive. It might be important to note, well it is important, that I'm running off an old K7 system, specifically, an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe with an Athlon 2600+ Barton and with my system drive(s) in a RAID-0 config under the control of a Silicon Image Sil3112 "RAID" serial ATA controller. These show up in the above dump but they aren't accessible as logical RAID-0 drive and they don't automagically show up on my Desktop or in the media directory, suggesting there's a problem with the "Plug and Play" code.

Anyway, I decided to delve further, and with the help of the "Flash-Memory" and "Linux USB subsystem" HOWTOs I came up with this :
"
Kanotix:/proc/bus/usb# cat devices

T: Bus=03 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#= 1 Spd=12 MxCh= 3
B: Alloc= 0/900 us ( 0%), #Int= 0, #Iso= 0
D: Ver= 1.10 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06
S: Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.22-10-kanotix ohci_hcd
S: Product=OHCI Host Controller
S: SerialNumber=0000:00:02.1
C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr= 0mA
I:* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub
E: Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS= 2 Ivl=255ms

T: Bus=02 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#= 1 Spd=12 MxCh= 3
B: Alloc= 0/900 us ( 0%), #Int= 0, #Iso= 0
D: Ver= 1.10 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06
S: Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.22-10-kanotix ohci_hcd
S: Product=OHCI Host Controller
S: SerialNumber=0000:00:02.0
C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr= 0mA
I:* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub
E: Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS= 2 Ivl=255ms

T: Bus=01 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#= 1 Spd=480 MxCh= 6
B: Alloc= 0/800 us ( 0%), #Int= 0, #Iso= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=01 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0000 ProdID=0000 Rev= 2.06
S: Manufacturer=Linux 2.6.22-10-kanotix ehci_hcd
S: Product=EHCI Host Controller
S: SerialNumber=0000:00:02.2
C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr= 0mA
I:* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub
E: Ad=81(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS= 4 Ivl=256ms
"
The above doesn't seem to be very helpful -- still no mention of anything resembling a flash drive.

"
Kanotix:/proc/bus/usb# mount
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
/ramdisk on /ramdisk type tmpfs (rw,size=1243608k,mode=755)
/ramdisk/home on /home type none (rw,bind)
/UNIONFS on /UNIONFS type unionfs (rw,dirs=/ramdisk=rw:/KANOTIX=ro,delete=whiteout)
/dev/hda on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro)
/dev/loop0 on /KANOTIX type squashfs (ro)
/dev/pts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0622)
/proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw,devmode=0666)
"
Still nothing useful. (note that I used the unionrw boot option but all of the above still happens without it)

"
Kanotix:/proc/scsi# cat scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: ATA Model: ST3160811AS Rev: 3.AA
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: ATA Model: ST3160811AS Rev: 3.AA
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
"
I can see my two Seagate drives in there but still no help.

Finally :

"
Kanotix:/proc/scsi# fdisk -l

Unable to seek on /dev/sda
"

and

"
Kanotix:/dev# ls -a s*
sda sda1 sda2 sdb sequencer sequencer2 sg0 sg1 snapshot sndstat stderr stdin stdout

shm:
. ..

snd:
. .. controlC0 controlC1 midiC1D0 pcmC0D0c pcmC0D0p pcmC0D1c pcmC0D2p seq timer
"

No mention of "sdc1" .

But, when I unplug the drive and plug it back in it is detected and mounted.

It seems pretty **censored** that such a simple thing as recognizing a USB flash drive and auto-mounting it in Linux is still a problem when it's almost 2008 -- The Windows install on this machine and ClarkConnect Enterprise Edition 4.1 SP1 on another machine have no problems with the drive.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

jdb2

jdb2 - 27.10.2007, 23:42 Uhr
Titel:

I said "It seems pretty **censored** that..."

Iya idn'tda nowka attha amela aswa onsideredca ulgarva .

Sehr glücklich

jdb2 - 28.10.2007, 01:24 Uhr
Titel:

I forgot to mention that I encounter an intermittent problem when Kanotix is booting up.
Specifically, there'll be a "Waiting for usb." message or something to that effect and then my system appears to hang or lock up for at least a minute, but then the boot up process continues. I've (I think) tracked down the message to a boot-up script executed by init, specifically the file "live-autoconfig" and line 1077 (according to "grep -i -r -n "usb" * | less" in init.d )
"echo -n "${BLUE}Waiting for ${YELLOW}usbcore${BLUE}. ${NORMAL}"

Also, and I don't know what is causing this or if it's related or relevant to anything, but IceWeasel/Firefox seems to be crashing/killing itself at random intervals -- it's happened three times since I started typing this reply. This problem just recently manifested itself (since yesterday) . Strange.

jdb2

(This is an edit: Actually the quoted line is not the source of the "Waiting for usb" message. Somewhere an init script launches another process that generates this message. It's part of the kernel derived from/related to Ubuntu )

( Actually, the above is again incorrect : the message is generated by the kernel before init starts. Duh. Stupid me. Winken

)

jdb2 - 29.10.2007, 20:27 Uhr
Titel:

This is an aside, but I've finally been bitten by the persistent home dir problem. Last night around 11PM US Central time I noticed that the 60mm jet engine cpu fan in my system had gone into afterburner mode and that something was hammering the cd/dvd-rom drive . The monitor was powered down, so I moved the mouse and was surprised to find that there was no response. In fact there was no response to repeated mouse wiggling and/or hitting various keys on the keyboard. Only after a long while did X come up and to my dismay it was almost totally unresponsive -- the screen was a garbled mess of half redrawn windows. Anyway, I saw a dialog box that was still in an incomplete state with the title text "Unresponsive Script" which could only mean one thing : IceWeasel/Firefox had gone on a rampage and had eaten up all memory and CPU resources. I wasn't expecting this under Linux, especially on a liveCD running off of a ramdisk. It seems that not only in Windows, but in *any* OS, if one leaves Firefox open for a long enough time it will exhibit this behavior. To get back to my little narrative, I tried opening a virtual terminal, but instead of a full screen text display I got a window that took up the top half of the screen and consisted of two columns : one on the left with garbled characters and one on the right with normal characters, both of which were in an extremely small, almost unreadable font. Even in this "VT" the system was unresponsive -- I had no choice but to do a hard reset and upon reboot and in X I found that Kanotix had neglected to save my home dir even though I had previously booted with the home=scan option and had unplugged and replugged the USB flash drive so that it was mounted. I had accumulated a significant amount of data so it's kind of an understatement to say that I was "upset" Sehr glücklich

. Suggestion to Kanotix team : include kernel support for the Magic SysRq Key -- this would have averted my data loss. But it's not anyone's fault except mine and FireF*ck -- can't live with it, can't live without it. I should have proactively saved my data when I noticed FireF*ck crashing. Anyway, hopefully after thousands of user complaints and bug reports about excessive memory and CPU usage, FF 3 will fix some of the problems, and if not, well, KHTML and WebKit are back together, and failing that, there's always Opera. Sehr glücklich

</end rant-aside>

jdb2

( This is an edit : "Suggestion to Kanotix team : include kernel support for the Magic SysRq Key" -- Actually, after RTFM Sehr glücklich

, apparently Kanotix does have this although it doesn't work right on my system. Firefox has gone south and consumed all my memory several times yet pressing Alt-SysRq-f , e, or i does nothing on my system -- and yes I am holding all the keys down at the same time Sehr glücklich

. )

( FF went on a rampage again and consumed all 1.5GB of my memory. Alt-SysRq-f doesn't work, which would be ideal if it did, as it is supposed to call oom_kill and kill a memory hog, which in this case would just be FF. In the 2007 THORHAMMER RC6B release the "e" and "i" commands do work though, killing everything, including FF and X, and dropping me into virtual terminal 1. The commands that are supposed to output system information, such as "m", "p" and "t", still don't work though.)

jdb2 - 02.11.2007, 21:31 Uhr
Titel:

I've encountered another symptom of the usb-flash-drive problem in connection with copying files to the usb drive when it actually shows up and is mounted. If, say, I want to save my Firefox state by copying the .mozilla directory to the drive, I'll open Konqueror , right click on ".mozilla" in my home directory, click "Copy To->Browse" and select the .mozilla dir on the drive ( an old saved Firefox state ) . The copy proceeds normally save for a problem with a symlink which isn't relevant. After copying, I open up sessionstore.js in my copied profile and search for a new web page that should indicate that the directory was _really_ copied but I find that nothing's changed ie. the .mozilla dir that was previously on the drive is unchanged. After this, the drive, "TRAVELDRIVE" in this case, disappears from the desktop and is no longer mounted. Wtf?

Also, on another note, possibly related to the flash drive problem, sometimes when I shut down Kanotix it gets stuck in the "Preparing to reboot" state and never gets to unmounting anything. In addition, sometimes when I boot up, X will seem to start but then my monitor will change modes and I'll be left with a blank black screen with a "functional" mouse pointer. After that, the start up process seems to halt and the only thing I can do is wiggle the mouse pointer.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Windows and other Linux distros seem to have no problem.

jdb2

jdb2 - 03.11.2007, 21:25 Uhr
Titel:

Yesterday I saw that a local store had an 8GB USB flash drive with a $50 rebate so I decided it would be worth the cost to get these problems resolved. The drive is an 8gb SanDisk Cruzer Micro. Anyway, today I did the usual : started up Kanotix, and set it up to save my config and home dir to the new flash drive. Everything looked like it worked. Upon rebooting and in text mode in run level 0 I saw that Kanotix reported a successful mounting of the image of my home dir from the flash drive. Unfortunately, when bootup was complete and I was in X, I discovered that Kanotix had again failed to restore my home directory or my settings. Also, again, I got an error message telling me that DBUS was not running.

Well, seeing that I'm using using probably the most compatible of all USB flash drive brands and that *no* other Linux distro that I can find has a problem with my system, this doesn't speak well for Kanotix in terms of hardware support, compatibility, and bugs -- attributes that Kanotix touts as being one of its most convincing qualities that puts it at the top of Linux live distros. I'm afraid I'm forced to move to something else. Well, it was nice talking to myself. Sehr glücklich

Cheers,

jdb2

ockham23 - 03.11.2007, 21:51 Uhr
Titel:

I have a Cruzer Micro too and never had a problem with it. Have you tested the cd for errors? At the boot screen, append cheat code testcd and delete quiet, so you can see the test results.

jdb2 - 04.11.2007, 01:26 Uhr
Titel:

Thanks for the tip. Deleted quiet and appended testcd . After a bunch of file checks ending in "index.html OK" Kanotix hit the cd/dvd-rom drive for a while and then produced "Everything looks OK" . :-/

jdb2

ockham23 - 04.11.2007, 08:28 Uhr
Titel:

Hm. Maybe the RAM modules are faulty. You can use memtest86+ from the boot menu to check for memory defects. The problem could also be caused by the RAID controller. What happens if you remove it and put in a PATA hard drive? (Just for testing).

jdb2 - 05.11.2007, 18:34 Uhr
Titel:

I disabled the SATA/RAID controller on my motherboard and disconnected the power cables from my SATA hard drives. Kanotix was still flaky. So, I let memtest86 run for 13 hours 23 minutes completing 14 passes with no errors. Booted up Kanotix again, still got the same problems. As a final test I booted up the latest version of Knoppix. I got none of the flakiness nor any of the errors upon boot-up and shut-down that I get in Kanotix. When I saved my config and home dir to the flash drive the drives did not disappear, BUT, for some reason upon a reboot Knoppix failed to restore anything even though I saw that it had apparently successfully mounted the ext2 image and run the config shell script during boot-up. That was the only problem. On Kanotix, seemingly randomly, upon boot-up I'll get various errors while the init scripts are running, and/or I'll get errors upon shut-down and/or it will lock-up at "Preparing to reboot", and/or X will lock up upon boot-up and will never get to bringing up the Desktop, and/or I'll get to the Desktop and X will crash, and/or I'll have strange monitor mode changes or the screen going black before KDE starts, and/or DBUS will fail to start. So, basically, I have no idea what the problem is. :-/

jdb2

gs - 05.11.2007, 20:39 Uhr
Titel:

I have been following this thread for a while.

the Sandisk-thing should be ok - have several of these working with Kanotix
Could your Kanotix-CD be the result of faulty burning -so many problems nobody has encounterd before?
The saveconfig and persistant home gives me problems too - unionrw no more working. Will try to sort things out when I find time to go to Kanotix-chat.....

jdb2 - 05.11.2007, 20:50 Uhr
Titel:

Did a boot with the option "testcd" and Kanotix reported that the CD looked OK, although I won't take that as an authoritative yes. Will do a re-burn just to be sure.

jdb2

gs - 06.11.2007, 06:28 Uhr
Titel:

they used to tell that you should burn DAO-mode and low speed

jdb2 - 06.11.2007, 18:49 Uhr
Titel:

Did a re-burn per the instructions regarding CD burning in the Kanotix manual and both the verification step and the MD5 sum checked out. Also, I used the updated 2007 THORHAMMER RC6B release. Booted up and right away got the "DBUS is not running" message . ( Not to mention all the other error messages while the init scripts are running like "message handler not found" etc.) So much for it being a problem with the disk.

jdb2

gs - 06.11.2007, 20:25 Uhr
Titel:

sorry - thought it would help

jdb2 - 06.11.2007, 22:13 Uhr
Titel:

There's no need to apologize Sehr glücklich

-- did I "sound" like I was irritated? If I did it's because I have Asperger's and talk like a robot whether in RL or on-line. Auf den Arm nehmen

Regards,

jdb2

jdb2 - 07.11.2007, 19:29 Uhr
Titel:

So, is there any way of getting these problems resolved, or at least diagnosed? It seems Kanotix has a problem with all NForce2 motherboards. I would post my log files but they're almost all empty! Even stranger, when I restarted the DHCP daemon the other day due to Internet connection problems ( not related to Kanotix ) it failed to start ( connection was down ) and said to check syslog as it had written something to it. I checked /var/log/syslog and there was nothing there! The only thing that produces anything useful is the DMESG command, but I've looked through its output and I don't see anything really out of the ordinary. ( of course, I'm not an expert ) Do I have to patch the kernel to get logging working? I really want to get these problems resolved. ( an a slightly related note, clicking on "System->Beryl Manager" crashes X)

jdb2

jdb2 - 08.11.2007, 19:08 Uhr
Titel:

Perhaps if someones translates the problems I'm having and posts them to the German forums there'd be more of a response. I would do it myself, being bilingual, but my other language is Classical Latin -- Linux, Novus ordo mundi! Vita sine Linux mortem viventem est! Sehr glücklich

.

jdb2

gs - 08.11.2007, 20:16 Uhr
Titel:

I would try to translate, but in order to be able to make sense I would need a list of your problems such as
1.
2.
3

your postings are quite lenghty - it is difficult to find the real questions.....