Sunday, December 23, 2007

Ubuntu - USB port problem

Since I updated from Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon, I was facing challenges getting my USB drive to work. The OS will not detect my camera, and either of my two flash drives. If the USB device would be detected after several minutes of silence, within a few minutes, system would throw the following error message -

"To avoid serious data loss, disable removable drives with the "Eject" option in the drive icon's context menu on the desktop, Computer place, or drive applet."

After weeks of frustration, I resorted to IRC.freenode.net at channel #Ubuntu for help.

The IRC user HardDisk suggested I do this -

sudo rmmod ehci_hcd ---> This will change USB 2.0 to USB 1.0
sudo modprobe ehci-hcd ---> This will revert the above change

Both of these commands should be used in conjunction.

Bingo! This solved the problem.

I've done a lot of updates to my OS recently. But those for later.

EDIT 11/24/2008 - Installing usbmount resolves the problem forever without slowing transfer.
EDIT 12/08/2008 - Blacklisting uhci_hcd in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist might help too.

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