USB-stick disconnects automatically

[nphilipp]

Hello,

I setup a small linux box booting from USB stick and running without Harddisk.
The USB stick is meant to be mounted all the time as it contains the whole OS and the home directory for various data.

Problem

The USB stick goes offline after several hours (in the last case after 14 hours) and reconnects immediately:

Apr 5 10:37:26 localhost kernel: [ 61.513365] Slow work thread pool: Ready
Apr 6 02:12:49 localhost kernel: [56183.935993] usb 1-3: USB disconnect, address 2
Apr 6 02:13:11 localhost kernel: [56205.988234] sd 4:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
...
Apr 6 02:13:11 localhost kernel: [56206.550697] usb 1-3: New USB device found,
idVendor=090c, idProduct=1000
...
Apr 6 02:13:18 localhost kernel: [56213.556867] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 7831552 512-byte logical blocks: (4.00 GB/3.73 GiB)

Some information about the system

Kernel Version: 2.6.32-5-686 (Debian 2.6.32-29)
Motherboard: Intel D945GSEJT
Some standard homeuser USB stick

Questions

Do you have some idea what the reason for this behavior could be?

May there be some hidden timeouts in either the USB stick, Motherboard, Linux Kernel...?
But until now the time to the disconnect does not seem to be fix but rather random.

Could it be some BIOS setting?

Are USB sticks not considered to be used as root device? I already reduced write access to the stick, but it didn't help.


I thank you very much for any help in advance.
Philipp

[Rubberman]

AFAIK, there is no reason why you can't use a USB stick to run as a system drive. People do frequently. Does it only go offline when it has been idle for some time, or does it do so even when file I/O is going on? There may be something going on with the device itself, or the USB hub, or port. I've personally never seen anything in standard BIOS settings to enable a USB timeout sort of behavior. Mostly what I see is a "legacy USB" setting that these days you probably don't want to enable as it will make booting from USB and using USB keyboards and mice quite impossible, from what I understand.