Disappearing USB Drives

[aram535]

Hello,

I'm having a very odd problem. I'm running Cent OS 5.3 on a Dell workstation with 4 1TB External USB drives.

I can newfs/mount the drives fine without any issues. I can write to them, fsck, everything. As soon as the machine reboots the drives become unusable. fsck doesn't even recognize them as a e2 drive.

All four drives are 1TB manufactured by TEAC. The four single drive USB enclosures are also the same, can't recall the manufacturer at this time. I'm using the building USB ports on the dell motherboard.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+
Mem: 4GB
Currently running: 2.6.18-128.1.16.el5PAE

Thanks.

[bigtomrodney]

It sounds like the drives aren't being unmounted cleanly. What filesystem are they formatted with?

Are you manually mounting them?

[aram535]

ext3, and they're in fstab.

/dev/sdf1 /backup/f ext3 defaults,noatime 0 0
/dev/sdg1 /backup/g ext3 defaults,noatime 0 0
/dev/sdh1 /backup/h ext3 defaults,noatime 0 0
/dev/sdi1 /backup/i ext3 defaults,noatime 0 0

[bigtomrodney]

Have you tried commenting out the drives in fstab and allowing them to mount automatically with udev/hotplug?

[aram535]

Ok commented out the fstab entries, restarted the machine and the drives.

The drives are recognized:

usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
usb 1-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

sdf: Write Protect is off
sdf: Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00
sdf: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdf: 1953525168 512-byte hdwr sectors (1000205 MB)
sdf: Write Protect is off
sdf: Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00
sdf: assuming drive cache: write through
sdf: sdf1
sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdf
sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
Vendor: Ext Hard Model: Disk Rev:
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 04
SCSI device sdg: 1953525168 512-byte hdwr sectors (1000205 MB)

That's just the enteries for 1 out of 4 drives.

#`ps -eaf` | grep udev # shows that udev is running
not mounting though.

[aram535]

Well I did something stupid and turned out ok:

I hit the power on one of the usb cages by mistake and the drive lost power, after I plugged it back in, I noticed the system was accessing it quickly and found:

usb-storage: device scan complete
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
EXT3 FS on sdf1, internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds

Tried that with the other three drives, and same thing. They all came online and were mounted.

I tried rebooting the system (init 6) and again the drives disappeared.

Next I powered off the drives, rebooted the system, after it was all the way up and in multi-user, I turned on the drives ... it started to recognize them, fsck and mount them.

So the answer is that the drives cannot be powered on when the system is coming up? That makes no sense!?