m0e
May 3rd, 2008, 05:27 PM
I am having a problem accessing USB hard drives since upgrading to Hardy. After the upgrade plugging in a USB hard drive resulted in various problems - the background turns white, all my icons in the Gnome panel turn into white squares with a red x on them that are mostly unresponsive, the mouse will still control the cursor but if a mouse click can get any response I seem to get an error message I can't read because all of the fonts are squares. I can use hotkeys to get out of x but I don't seem to be able to do anything from the command line. The TTY hotkeys give me a login but after entering a username and pressing enter the keyboard stops responding and nothing happens. Checking the log files in /var have given me no clues because there are no entries after the USB hard drive is recognized. USB flash drives work fine, the problem seems to be only with hard drives. I have four USB drives, a 120gb drive formatted as FAT32, a 160gb formatted as Ext3 (this is my Hardy boot drive, the internal drives are a pair of 60gb drives in a RAID0 configuration formatted as NTFS for my Windows partition), a 250gb drive formatted as FAT32, and a 320gb drive formatted as NTFS.
I went into the gconf settings and turned off automount in the Nautilus preferences and now I can manually mount the 120gb drive through Nautilus, but if I try to mount the 250gb drive that way I still get the same problems, and the 320gb still tries to automount and screws everything up the same as before. All the hard drives work fine when booting from the Windows XP partition on this computer or booting the computer from the Gutsy live CD, Hardy live CD, Gparted live CD or any of my other computers (Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Ubuntu Feisty, or my other Ubuntu Hardy install, but I haven't tried them on any of my Macs). I have checked the drives using the various disk repair utilities in the different OS's of my machines and not found any errors. I ran a couple of virus scans on the drives and found no problems there also. I can access the internal RAID partition through dmraid and ntfs3g so I don't think thats the problem.
Both my Hardy machines were upgraded through the Update Manager system, not a fresh install. I would rather not do a fresh install on this machine because of the hassle with setting up the MBR's after the install. Ultimately I would like to move the Hardy partition to the internal drives but there isn't enough free space on the RIAD partition and I haven't had any luck making a disk image of it to restore the Windows partition after upgrading the internal drives. The 120gb drive and the 250gb drives were accessible when I had Feisty installed on this machine, but I didn't have the 320gb drive then so I don't know if it would have. I did a fresh install when upgrading to Gutsy but was only running that for a couple of weeks before doing the Hardy upgrade and didn't use any of the USB hard drives during that time.
If anyone has any suggestions as where else to look for problems or if I need to provide any more info just let me know.
I went into the gconf settings and turned off automount in the Nautilus preferences and now I can manually mount the 120gb drive through Nautilus, but if I try to mount the 250gb drive that way I still get the same problems, and the 320gb still tries to automount and screws everything up the same as before. All the hard drives work fine when booting from the Windows XP partition on this computer or booting the computer from the Gutsy live CD, Hardy live CD, Gparted live CD or any of my other computers (Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Ubuntu Feisty, or my other Ubuntu Hardy install, but I haven't tried them on any of my Macs). I have checked the drives using the various disk repair utilities in the different OS's of my machines and not found any errors. I ran a couple of virus scans on the drives and found no problems there also. I can access the internal RAID partition through dmraid and ntfs3g so I don't think thats the problem.
Both my Hardy machines were upgraded through the Update Manager system, not a fresh install. I would rather not do a fresh install on this machine because of the hassle with setting up the MBR's after the install. Ultimately I would like to move the Hardy partition to the internal drives but there isn't enough free space on the RIAD partition and I haven't had any luck making a disk image of it to restore the Windows partition after upgrading the internal drives. The 120gb drive and the 250gb drives were accessible when I had Feisty installed on this machine, but I didn't have the 320gb drive then so I don't know if it would have. I did a fresh install when upgrading to Gutsy but was only running that for a couple of weeks before doing the Hardy upgrade and didn't use any of the USB hard drives during that time.
If anyone has any suggestions as where else to look for problems or if I need to provide any more info just let me know.