Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

Looks like two of us have had our flash drives wiped. Back to the drawing board!

Jesse · Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 465 Location: Auckland, NZ

Hi,

There is a command line equivelent to what MUT displays,
/usr/lib/mut/disks.tcl
Its output is similar to probedisk, and could be made to be identical, and I could probably even make up a version to match probepart too. If thats something that you guys are interested in?
I'm not sure if probepart or probedisk understand a superfloppy formatted hard disk correctly.

MUT gets its disk/partition sizes from /proc/partitions, so it indicates a byte size that is for a partition, rather than what a freshly formatted filesystem would have as its available space, as different filesystems have different overheads, and they are not always mounted to ask! Wink

.

Jesse

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

Jesse, I think it is your call whether you use your reworked probedisk/probepart, or if you hack MUT's disks.tcl. I'd point out though, that fixing probedisk/probepart to work with USB devices, also fixes the numerous applications that depend on them. I'm not actually all that interested in pmount because I like the looks of MUT better personally (specifically, words rather than pictures on buttons); my interest is in getting all those other applications like Universal Installer solid with USB devices. So my vote is to continue to get probedisk/probepart running. Or you could hack disks.tcl and rename it probedisk too, I suppose (maybe that was what you were suggesting!)

Oh, I guess I do have an interest in seeing MUT and pmount agree with each other. Looks more polished, you know. Wink

I don't know your code of course, but I am guessing that it could not have wiped our flash drives. Or maybe it is getting confused, displaying an underlying bug somewhere else that wipes the drives. Can we chase this down by running pmount from the command line? Are there lots of debug messages in pmount? pakt, did your drives get wiped when running pmount only, or did you have MUT up too like I did?

I'm just trying to imagine what possible command or sequence of events could wipe a drive clean like that. I don't think MUT or pmount has an "rm" command in there somewhere!

Jesse · Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 465 Location: Auckland, NZ

If PaulBx1 or Pakt can figure out what the steps are to get a wiped drive, then we can probably find a way to prevent that from happening again by accident.
Its probably not a 'rm' command as such, I don't expect you would find that in either pmount or MUT.
Its probably something more like mounting a filesystem twice and unmounting it once or something odd like that. Hmmm... I might go try that...

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 5082 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

This was the nightmare I encountered writing usb-auto... unreliability!
Plugging & unplugging causes a USB shuffle, making rescan nessasary.

If there's a good fix for this, I'll take another attempt at usb-auto.

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

Jesse, I still have your reworked probedisk/probepart installed in my Puppy 211. My system is an old Thinkpad with one USB 1.1 port (uhci-hcd). That port has a 4-port hub plugged into it. I rebooted like that without having any flash drive plugged in. Then I did the following (slowly):

1) started pmount
2) plugged in I-stick, refreshed pmount
(CD goes crazy for a minute, then pmount shows sda correctly)
3) plugged in sandisk, refreshed pmount
(CD goes crazy for a minute, then pmount shows sda and sdb correctly)
4) plugged in lexar firefly, refreshed pmount
(CD goes crazy for a minute, then pmount shows sdb and sdc, but no sda/I-stick
probedisk shows them all)
5) refreshed pmount again
(result the same)

Here is what the console window that I called pmount from looked like:

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 5082 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

Best of luck... when you throw in USB drives with multiple partitions,
& then add USB card drives with multi. cards plugged in with multi. partitions,
it quickly becomes apparent that a new USB device info scan utility is needed
as it appears that current utilities for USB devices fall short of the mark.

I'll watch with interest, as Linux badly needs an auto. mounter for USB devices.

plinej · Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 1554

I don't know if Jesse plans on doing a rewrite of probedisk and probepart (please do if you don't mind) using disks.tcl but in the meantime I hacked away at a couple of replacement scripts using disks.tcl output, /var/log/messages, /proc/scsi/scsi, & /proc/partitions. All I have are a few usb drives, an internal cdrom, an external cdrom, and an ide hard drive to test with though. I'm not sure what the required changes need to be made to view other drives successfully (if it doesn't automatically). Here's my replacement scripts:

probedisk:

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

Heh, for a second I got Jesse mixed up with Jason, since Jesse piped in. I meant to refer to you, Jason, in that last post. Hey, your names start with the same letter... Laughing

Your rework of disks.tcl had two good effects. It stopped the abuse of my CD drive (no error messages now). And it seems faster although I haven't timed it rigorously.

The bad news is that after adding sdc, sda still drops out of the picture in pmount. That is a pmount-specific problem it seems.

BTW, that's some pretty fast scripting, J-person! Very Happy

Here is the difference between the various programs. probedisk2 is the original, probedisk 3 is your first hack, probedisk is your latest, probepart3 is the original I think, and probepart your latest:

plinej · Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 1554

I totally re-wrote the scripts without using disks.tcl. I did use that /usr/lib/mut/bin/guess_fstype which is great. I also used /var/log/messages and several things in /proc. Once again I don't have a floppy or zip drive so I can't test everything but if anyone has problems with a drive not being recognized or recognized incorrectly let me know so I can work on the scripts. As far as problems with pmount I'd have to see your version since you may not have the latest version. I know dougal did some work to it and then I did again and he mentioned totally re-writing it so it's hard to keep track of the latest version. Also my cd drives don't seem to spin up with these scripts either so it seems pretty fast.

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

The header of my pmount says:

# v1.0.7 Nov 2005: bugfix by GuestToo.
# Jan 2006 updated for Puppy2.

It is 20631 bytes. All dates on the file say 4 Oct 2006.

I don't know if that is the latest. If not, where can I find it?

I will try your new probestuff.

<later>
probedisk looks good but probepart seems to be missing the last field (see the below comparison). Also, why does it say my flashdrives are vfat? I think they must be fat16, which is "msdos", like the old probepart says, right?

plinej · Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 1554

The pmount I've got is 24665 bytes. I'll post it below. I didn't add the last field to probepart since I don't think it's used for anything in puppy that I know of. Didn't figure adding the extra code would be necessary. As far as the vfat thing goes it should be the same thing as mut reports since it uses /usr/lib/mut/bin/guess_fstype to retrieve it.

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

OK, I put this new pmount in. First thing I noticed is that it saw all 3 flash drives.

Then I started pulling flash drives and replugging them in, only one out at any one time. When I did refresh in pmount sometimes I was too fast and had to re-do it to find the device (I know there is a delay in there). But everything worked fine, through several cycles.

Then I tried running MUT in parallel and almost immediately, two flash drives swapped names!

I started out as before, with the I-stick2 being sda, the SanDisk being sdb, and the Lexar being sdc. sda and sdb had their names swapped.

Here is /var/log/messages. You will notice at the point they were swapped, it noted two devices were pulled although only one really was pulled. I added two blank lines at that point so you could find it. BTW the second (and I believe, bogus) disconnect has the same time stamp as the following entry.

PaulBx1 · Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 2307 Location: Wyoming, USA

Woops, scratch that idea.

I just got a simpler one. I booted with all 3 flash drives in their usual spot. Started pmount only, saw them all. Pulled sda, refreshed, it was gone. Plugged it back in, refreshed, and the I-stick (what was called sda) was never seen nor heard from again; pmount now calls the SanDisk sda (was previously sdb). The Lexar Firefly remains sdc as before.

Here is the log:

GuestToo · Puppy Master Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 4078