Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[sazeile]

I have two external USB hard drives connected to my system:

80 GB NTFS Western Digital
10 GB 4 Partion FAT32 IBM Laptop Salvage

I don't see either of them in the Media Utility Tool. I'm not trying to boot from them. They don't appear on boot up (even with SLEEP=30) and they don't appear if I try hot plugging. On the USB Viewer I see:

USB UHCI Root Hub
USB UHCI Root Hub
Back-UPS ES 500 FW:801.e5.
USB UHCI Root Hub
deskjet 3420
CanoScan
VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0

So Puppy is recognizing the UPS, printer, and scanner but not the hard drives.

During boot up I see repeated errors that look like:

USB.c USB Device not accepting Newaddress=1 Error=-100

The address number increments through 6 before X comes up.

If I erase the pup001 file and start from scratch the number just keeps incrementing until I interrupt it by hitting Enter.

I can see the read light on the WD drive flash every few seconds so it looks like something in the background is periodically trying to access the drive.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Steve

[Guest]

Well, after lot's of googling, I found it. The problem has to do with ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface). One article suggested adding acpi=noirq to the boot command but that didn't work for me. However, adding acpi=off does the trick on my machine. With acpi=off there is no automatic standby or turn-off but that's an acceptable alternative to not being able to use an external USB harddrive.

Steve

[Flash]

You can unmount them and turn them off when you aren't using them, right?

[Guest]

When I open MUT the read lights flash.

Moving MUT across the screen also causes a read as does mounting and unmounting.

With them not mounted, I unplugged the USB and MUT will then lists the drive partition names as "unknown". MUT does not reassign the drive letter (sda, sdb).

Plugging back in is no problem even to a different USB port.

I haven't tried unplugging with drive mounted.

I'm not adventurous enough to risk loosing the data on those disks by unplugging them while mounted.



Steve

[Flash]

I think you're unlikely to lose data by unplugging without unmounting unless data is actively transferring when you unplug. If you do unplug without unmounting, and you use ext3 (journaled) filesystem, the recovery should theoretically be quicker when you reconnect.

Hmm, I think the activity lights come because some filesystem "bookkeeping" (permission checking for instance) is done when you mount or unmount, but I can't imagine why simply moving MUT around on your desktop would cause it.

[sazeile]

I suspect that when MUT is moved it refreshes (queries all drives) and that is what causes the lights to flash. Reconnect time is just a blink or two.