USB is not recognized

[fatmystic]

I am not exectly the newbie. However for this issue I am just as one.

I have just evaluated the Mint8 fxce main edition. There is unusual problem as follow.

When the CD is booted with defaults, the system hangs at Ready after the initial loads.The courser stays at the top left corner.
When the CD is booted with the additional "acpi=off noaicp" it boots completely. The detail info is hidded and can be read with :"Esc" key. However it is too late to get all message. After it is booted, I can see two hard drives (IDE and SATA) and all partitions under a sudo in terminal mode. SO far good. The fdisk shows :
mint@mint ~ $ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1549f232

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 981 7879851 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 * 982 3414 19543072+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 3415 4524 8916075 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 3415 3476 497983+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 3477 3719 1951866 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 3720 3781 497983+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 3782 3843 497983+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 3844 4027 1477948+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 4028 4151 995998+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda11 4152 4275 995998+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda12 4276 4524 2000061 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 100.3 GB, 100256292864 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12188 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x65a10e2b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 12188 97900078+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
mint@min


Howewer it does not show two USB drives on the computer. Nor can I find any under /proc/bus/usb. What is wrong here? How can I use USB ports for drives, scanner, printers etc?

The system is HP Pavillian A1100E with AMD Sempron 3200+ and Phoenix bios 3.08 09/13/2005. It has 2GB memory.
The system is usable with windows XP. I am plannig to use Linux dual boot system.

I hope some one can leads to the solution.

[Nevart]

I have seen this before. You could try unplugging the USB and then plugging it back in again. If the drives are really big (eg. more than 200GB) then it takes a long time for the system to show them because apparently (just like Windows) it tries to index the whole drive before showing it as existing. Check when you plug the device in if it lights up or flickers or anything because that means that the system is checking the device. If it does not do that, then I think it is a hardware issue, either that the drivers are not installed and/or you have some weird el-cheapo motherboard.

[fatmystic]

Thanks Nevart for the response.

I had tried plug/unplug on USB drive without any luck. There is no light (flicker or no flicker) on USB drives that tells me that the driver is not working. Both USB drives are less than 1GB.

So all the symptoms had been tried before the original post. The hardware is working correctly as everything works under WindowsXP. It is 5 year old and reputed computer so the cheapo stuff does not apply nor does the hardware failure.

The issue at the ubuntu site was identified as the Kernel issue. I thought it may be resolved. The original issue at UBUNTU site is under the disk error where the IDE and SAT together keeps the driver in a loop at the boot time. And thus you need to use "acpi=off noaicp".

Is there any tool available on Mint8 CD that I can use to monitor the boot log, USB driver and ports?
Without USB I can't use anything (printer, scanner etc.)

[MrD]

Just to check, have you updated Mint after the initial install or are you trying to plug in a USB device immediately? I've noticed my 4 gig usb flashdrive does not get recognised after an initial install and requires Mint updating AND my laptop resetting before the flashdrive is recognised.

[fatmystic]

Thanks Mr. D for the suggestion.

I was testing the live CD of the Mint8. Thus it can not be no updated yet. I am afraid that I need to install the Mint before completion of the evaluation. The update will only work when the Mint is on hard drive.
Another alternative is to boot through USB and update to check if it is working. Which does not sound comfortable as it does not recognize the USB ports at all.

[fatmystic]

After reading on kernel development, I found that following parameter is required for the old motherboard.
pci=biosirq

Thus the boot command is added with "--acpi=of --noapic pci=biosirq"

Thanks for all who tried to help.