DebuggingRemovableDevices

Debugging Central

This page is part of the debugging series — pages with debugging details for a variety of Ubuntu packages.

Introduction

Help on debugging removable device issues.

Things to try first

Run fsck (dosfsck?) on the disk to make sure it does not have any configuration errors. Sometimes a misconfigured drive will work fine in Windows but not in Linux.

In Hardy or later, remove the "usefree" option with gconf-editor (Applications --> System Tools --> Configuration Editor). This can prevent drives from auto-mounting.https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-mount/+bug/151025 The "usefree" option should be removed from system --> storage --> default_options --> vfat --> mount_options

How to report

When reporting a problem with removable devices, such as USB storage devices ("keys", hard drives, card readers, music players, digital cameras, etc.), please do the following steps:

  1. disconnect the device
  2. in a terminal, start "udevadm" in monitor mode and capture output

    sudo udevadm monitor -e | tee udev.log
  3. connect the device
  4. open a second Terminal and capture lshal, dmesg and ls

    lshal > lshal.txt
    dmesg > dmesg.txt
    ls -l /dev/sd* > devices.txt
  5. press Control-C in the first terminal with the "udevadm".
  6. attach lshal.txt, devices.txt, dmesg.txt and udev.log to the bug report

  7. copy/paste into the report the output of

    ck-list-sessions 
  8. copy/paste into the report the output of

    id haldaemon 
  9. copy/paste into the report the output of

    uname -a 

In easy cases this is everything that is needed. However, you might be asked for a "hal debug output"; please do the following steps to get it:

  1. disconnect the device
  2. stop hald

    sudo killall hald 
  3. start hald while capturing its output

    sudo hald --daemon=no --verbose=yes 2>&1 | tee hal.log 
  4. wait until the flood of messages settled
  5. connect the device
  6. wait again until no more messages appear
  7. press Control-C to stop the foreground hal
  8. restore the background hal

    sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart 
  9. attach hal.log to the bug report

  10. restart your desktop session

Debugging procedure

TBD.

Known bugs

Description of known issues, how to recognise them and stock responses/actions.

Open

Bug#

Description

Action

TBD.

TBD.

TBD.

Closed

Bug#

Description

Action

TBD.

TBD.

TBD.

Non-bugs

TBD.


CategoryBugSquad CategoryDebugging

DebuggingRemovableDevices (last edited 2011-01-07 14:06:15 by 67-42-160-182)