Problems with disconnecting USB drives

[James Tappin]

On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:53:18 -0400
Jeff Layton <laytonjb at att.net> wrote:

JL>   Good afternoon,
JL> 
JL> I'm running Kubuntu 11.04 on a USB hard drive connected to a
JL> 4-port USB hub to my laptop (this way I can run Linux on my
JL> work laptop when I need to :)  ). I've got another USB drive
JL> that is formatted as ext3 and contains some data I want to access
JL> from the laptop when I'm booted into Kubuntu. Every time I
JL> plug the drive into the hub I get the following error message
JL> in the system logs:
JL> 
JL> [ 161.254142 ] usb 2-1.1.2   USB disconnect, address 7
JL> 
JL> At this point I can no longer access the Kubuntu drive and the
JL> system ends up freezing at some point because the drive is
JL> not longer there. I've waited for a long time (15 minutes) to see
JL> if it's doing USB device discovery but no joy.
JL> 
JL> I surfed around the net a little but didn't see any apparent ways
JL> to fix this. Any ideas?

I bit of a guess but:
Are the drives powered from the USB bus or from separate supplies?
(Likewise the hub?) It is possible that if everything is powered from
the laptop's USB port there's not enough power and it loses the drive.

-- 
+------------------------+-------------------------------+---------+
| James Tappin           | School of Physics & Astronomy |  O__    |
| sjt at star.sr.bham.ac.uk | University of Birmingham      | --  \/` |
| Ph: 0121-414-6462. Fax: 0121-414-3722                  |         |
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