Solved Hard disk not recognized by BeagleBone

[BSDfanNo2]

I have an 80 MB external USB hard disk, the brand is Lacie. It works on FreeBSD 11 on a amd64 PC. I repartioned it fine. This is what dmesg tells me:

ugen2.2: <Lacie Group. SA> at usbus2
umass0: <Lacie Group. SA Lacie Mobile Drive, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.01, addr 2> on usbus2
umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x4100
umass0:4:0: Attached to scbus4
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus4 target 0 lun 0
da0: <WDC WD80 0BEVE-11UYT0 0000> Fixed Direct Access SCSI device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 76319MB (156301488 512 byte sectors)
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

When I plug the very same disk on a BeagleBone also running FreeBSD 11, the disk is not recognized (the device does not appear in /dev). This is what dmesg tells me:

ugen1.2: <Lacie Group. SA> at usbus1
umass0: <Lacie Group. SA Lacie Mobile Drive, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.01, addr 2> on usbus1
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command

The BeagleBone hardware is fine, I can plug the same disk in another BeagleBone running Debian and there is a device in /dev as expected.

It would seem that on a BeagleBone running FreeBSD 11 there is some driver missing. Any ideas? I am not sure how to find how to move forward.

P. S. I am not sure what is the best area of this forum for this question, it could be Embedded, General or Storage, so please feel free to move the thread if it is in the wrong area.

P. S 2. If I plug a pen flash drive in the BeagleBone running FreeBSD 11 as seen below, it works well, so the problem seems to be the lack of a driver for the hard disk.

ugen1.2: <Generic> at usbus1
umass0: <Generic Mass Storage, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.05, addr 2> on usbus1
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Generic Flash Disk 8.07> Removable Direct Access SPC-2 SCSI device
da0: Serial Number 86CC13D3
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 7800MB (15974400 512 byte sectors)
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

 

[BSDfanNo2]

On Friday the Lacie hard drive was not working. Today, Monday, it is working. I rebooted and it still worked but I powered the BB down and up and it stopped working.

Then I connected the Lacie drive to a powered USB hub and this seems to have fixed the problem reliably. Note that this drive is powered, so I would expect that it would work without a powered USB hub. Also the Lacie drive works well if I connect to a BeagleBone running Debian. It looks like Linux is doing a better job with respect to power but this is a very minor thing so no point in worrying about it.

I will mark this issue as solved, and the solution is to use a powered USB hub. I also tested a Toshiba 2 TB drive connected to the BB via a hub and it worked.