Problems mounting External USB Drives

[Lawrence Houston]

DELL Precision Users:

On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, Lawrence Houston wrote:

> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Lawrence Houston wrote:
>
>>                                                    I understand the USB 
>> Drive Support within the 2.4 Kernels is "lacking" and upgrading to RHEL4 
>> might be a "Solution"???  Secondly one fellow on the RHEL3 List finds his 
>> "luck" with
>
> We came across a second "Problem" while running the Rescue Mode from the 
> Original RHEL3 CD-ROMs which came with the Precision 370: after having 
> selected "linux rescue" from the opening prompt the USB Keyboard would no 
> longer respond on any of the following screens (although this was NOT the 
> case with RHEL4-U4's Rescue Mode)...  Some other posts mention USB Keyboard 
> Issues related to USB Support within the BIOS and suggest Flashing the 
> BIOS...  Currently we have A03 (the most recent Update being A08), where 
> "Correct USB detach performance" is addressed...  Does anyone know if 
> Flashing a Precisions 370's BIOS from A03 to A08 would help with either the 
> original External USB Drive "Issue" or our newer RHEL3 USB Keyboard 
> "Problem"???

After Flashing the 370's BIOS to A08 the External 300 GIG HP USB Drive did 
show up under RHEL3 (2.4 Kernel) and was mountable, but accessing the data 
produced an endless stream of read errors...  After that upgrading to 
RHEL4 (2.6 Kernel) we were back to being unable to identify the 300 GIG HP 
Drive and therefore unable to mount it either...

Flashing the BIOS to A08 did NOT correct the USB Keyboard "Problem" the 
Rescue Mode booting from DELL's Original RHEL3 CD-ROMs...

Lawrence Houston  --  (dell at greenfield.dyndns.org)