USB attached disk hangs
Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.
I put a 1.5 TB SATA disk into an external USB enclosure to use my Eee as a media server, and it runs great with fuppes from my PS3, but when leaving the machine running for several hours, it would result in the disk not being accessible.
Apr 18 10:10:28 ubuntu-eee kernel: [183391.907522] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 6 Apr 18 10:10:28 ubuntu-eee kernel: [183391.926314] xfs_force_shutdown(sdd1,0x1) called from line 1031 of file /build/buildd/linux-2.6.35/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_buf.c. Return address = 0xf94d0858 Apr 18 10:11:01 ubuntu-eee kernel: [183425.224119] Filesystem "sdd1": xfs_log_force: error 5 returned.
I looked up the errors and was directed to kernel bug #32432 and Ubuntu bug #349767 and #701011.
The suggestion in one of the comments is to turn off power management by adding this line to rc.local; whilst I don’t see this as a permanent solution, it will suffice for the moment:
for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/level; do echo on > $i; done
Thanks are due to everyone who has contributed to these bug reports, I’m happy to offer to help but I doubt there’s much I can do to fix the problem, unfortunately. I guess it’s up to the owner of the relevant part of the kernel.