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Topic: External usb drives not working properly (Read 1471 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: External usb drives not working properly

Reply #15 –
Well I looked at some more things but then the usb 2.0 / esata enclosure seems to be faulty and is not working in Devuan too with 500GB drives at least, it still works with smaller ones although the online specs say it supports any size and it used to. I tried both 500GB drives in that and they won't mount and give a partition size in TB with fdisk -l. So it seems the answer is simply faulty hardware and unhelpful coincidence creating patterns that seem to have meaning but in fact are randomly generated.

Code: [Select]
Dell M4500 lsmod in Artix:

diff between no drive plugged in and then USB 3.0 drive plugged in but not mounted:
+uas                    32768  0
+usb_storage            86016  1 uas

no change when swapped from USB 2.0 port to express card 3.0 adapter.

diff after drive is mounted, placed back in 2.0 port:
-uas                    32768  0
+uas                    32768  1
-btrfs                1998848  2
+btrfs                1998848  3
-crc32c_intel           24576  3
+crc32c_intel           24576  4

no change when unmounted, swapped from USB 2.0 port to express card 3.0 adapter and remounted.

Installed power packages:
acpid 2.0.34-1
cpupower 6.0-2 (linux-tools)
mate-power-manager 1.26.0-1 (mate-extra)
upower 1.90.0-1

Some testing in Devuan, same result in Artix now:
$ sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /zmnt
mount: /zmnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 122096646 sectors
Disk model: 00LPLX-08ZNTT0
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa9d2e011

Device     Boot Start       End   Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1       49152 972578815 972529664  3.6T 83 Linux

Re: External usb drives not working properly

Reply #16 –
 Yeah that's the case @nous said it in its first reply that there's need to rule out first, hardware problems.

Re: External usb drives not working properly

Reply #17 –
Quote from: nous – on
Rule out hardware issues by booting the MATE or community-gtk Artix ISO and testing the USB drives.

start first buy plugging it in and unplugging it and do a dmesg.  If it is not popping up correctly, it is a good chance of being hardware and  your  can then see if the hardware is working in a VM.  If it is being seen, then   it might still be hardware, but you will see other errors as the drive spins up.    Try manual mounting and test the hardware.
 

Re: External usb drives not working properly

Reply #18 –
To update the situation, the Newlink enclosure seems perfectly OK with my older smaller drives, it is an old model itself as it has a 2007 date on the base of the PCB. Not sure why it worked in the past with the 500GB drives but I wondered if it was because as they have filled up with more data, it cannot address it all? Then I got another USB 3.0 enclosure, a cheap commonly available unbranded one with a transparent case you can slide the top off and a non standard 2 segment input plug on the supplied usb lead. That only works with one WD 500GB drive, don't know if it's faulty from new, but my oldest 2007 dated 120GB drive just makes funny noises when plugged into that and the others I tried didn't work properly either. So then I got another new 2.5 USB 3.0 enclosure, an Icy Box AC703-U3, and happily that's working with everything I've tried in there on Artix and Devuan with no problems or weird behaviour observed so far.