Tuesday, May 18, 2010

CentOS 5.5 USB Device Mounting Annoyance

What do you expect the next version of your favourite distribution to be? Better or worse. For me upgrading CentOS 5.2 to 5.5 became a worse experience. I was running CentOS 5.2 on my office workstation (Dell Optiplex 360) for long. Never really needed/worried to upgrade cos it was only a work station, I mean no play, only work. However, of late I wanted to pull in some multimedia stuff from rpmforge (that's not available in official CentOS repo). At the same time I thought of upgrading the system also. And I went ahead... Read below for the annoyances.

The fully upgraded system now has two kernels - kernel-2.6.18-92.el5 (original CentOS 5.2 kernel) and kernel-2.6.18-194.el5 (came with CentOS 5.5 upgradation), menu.lst points to the latest kernel as default boot options.

1. Annoyances with the new kernel: Running the new CentOS 5.5 kernel was fast, responsive... audio/video worked like a charm. But oddly enough I am unable to mount any USB drives (specially the ones with sdhc cards such as phones and cameras); lsusb does show make of the device and its id, but refuses to automount it. Even doesn't accept manual mounts.

2. Newly surfaced problem with the old kernel: After being unable to mount usb devices I rebooted the system to run the old kernel. To my surprise, the old kernel automounted all the usb drives that I threw at it. But, sadly, alsa sound server did not work the way it should. It was working fine before upgradation.

Solution: I wandered across dozens of forums for a solution and could not get any. Now I've to boot to the old kernel when I need to use USB drives, otherwise, the default 2.6.18-194.el5 kernel handles everything quite well.

Please comment to this post if you have a solution for this weird problem.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may want to take a look at:

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/HAL

Best Regards
Marcus

Unknown said...

> Please comment to this post
> if you have a solution for
> this weird problem.

Have you written a bug report? Not everything can be tested under all circumstances, and while this does seem like an odd one to miss, getting the info to the distro developers is always a good idea.

Anonymous said...

For info, all of the USB stuff and automount is perfectly working on my Dell Dimension 9150 (kernel 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 64 bits) and my Dell Précision 360 (using the same kernel version but 32 bits).

To get some more info, try a have a console with :
tail -f /var/log/messages

When you plug in your USB device

--
Christian

How about this