USB Issue with New Kernel?

[Steve Grace]

On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 06:17 -0400, Michael "TheZorch" Haney wrote:
> Steve Grace wrote:
> > I'm running Ubuntu Hardy. Yesterday I upgraded the kernel to the new
> > 2.6.24-21-generic. I now have an issue with an external USB hard drive
> > (Western Digital) that I use for backing up.
> >
> > I normally leave the drive off until I'm ready to back up and then turn
> > it off again when the backup is done (after the drive is unmounted).
> > This has worked fine in the past, but now the drive usually doesn't
> > mount when doing that. My printer and scanner (both USB) appear to work
> > fine.
> >
> > It appears that the drive will mount if it's powered on when Ubuntu
> > boots. It may also mount if there's been some USB activity during the
> > current session. However, once the drive is unmounted it appears that it
> > won't mount again until the computer is restarted.
> >
> > Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem?
> >   
> I have the new kernel and don't have any trouble with USB mounted 
> storage of any kind.  Are you plugging this into a USB hub, if so it 
> could indicate a problem with that hub that Windows may ignore but Linux 
> is sensitive to, or it could be a problem with the hard drive controller 
> on that USB drive.  If you can see if other USB storage devices work 
> like flash memory.  I had some problems but they were totally unrelated 
> to the kernel.
> 
> I had a problem with a 2GB flash Sansa Clip mp3 player but that was due 
> to a problem with Amarok which was causing a conflict, I've since fixed 
> that problem.  I also had trouble mounting a USB hard drive, but it was 
> a NTFS issue.  The "in-use" flag in the filesystem was still on because 
> I only turned it off rather than safely removing it and I had to reboot 
> into Windows to clear it and now it mounts without any issues.  See if 
> your USB hard drive is formatted NTFS, if so you may need to boot to 
> Windows and then "safely remove" it via the icon that appears on the 
> Systray to make sure that flag is turned off.

The drive is not plugged into a hub. The drive contains two partitions,
one NTFS and one ext3. I once had the issue you mentioned with the NTFS
partition being "in use" but Ubuntu displayed a message about it and
still mounted the ext3 partition.

The point is that the drive mounts fine with all previous kernels but
not with the most current one (-21). I can boot into the previous kernel
(-19) and all is well.

I guess I'm alone with this issue.

Steve