USB drive still doesn't work

D

donallen

I have tried periodically to use FreeBSD -- a couple of the 7.x releases, 8.0 and now 8.1. I do my backups on Seagate SATA drives in USB shoeboxes with ext2 filesystems. These drives work fine with Linux (Slackware) and OpenBSD. But with FreeBSD, absolutely no luck. The 7.x releases would freeze (there was also a serious bug in the ext2 implementation on amd64 systems that would crash the system; this was known about before I reported it and I got a patch very quickly). The much-needed reimplementation of the USB layer in 8.x gave me new hope, but I'm still getting nowhere.

I have 8.1 RELEASE installed on a Thinkpad G41, an old system I use for experimenting. When I plug in one of the USB drives directly to the machine, I get "AutoSense Failed", followed by "fatal error, failed to attach to device" and "removing device entry" in /var/log/messages. If I try plugging the drive into a USB hub (Adaptec) and plug the hub into the machine, the system freezes until I remove the USB connector.

I'm ready to give up on FreeBSD again (I can't use it if I can't back it up), but thought I'd try this first to see if anyone has any bright ideas. I must say I'm amazed that the USB troubles continue -- it's been something like 2 years that I've tried this off and on and the outcome has always been the same.

/Don Allen
 
Please post this to the freebsd-usb mailing list, including details like brand and model, lines from /var/log/messages and probably usbconfig(8). HPS has been very quick to respond.
 
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