Ubuntu

64GB pen drives not recognised

Asked by Mercedes99

I have 3 Kingston DataTraveler G4 64GB pen drives and one 32GB one. All were working perfectly 30 days ago, but today my machine can see the 32GB one, but can't see any of the 64GB ones.

I am running Ubuntu 15.10.

I have tried running lvmdiskscan in terminal and I have tried via gparted partition editor and the Disks utility. The answer is the same each time - 32GB good (sdb01), 64GB nowhere to be seen.

The pen drives are not that old - 6 months, and they were all formatted on my machine using gparted. I can accept that one drive might have suffered catastrophic failure since last month - but 3 of them? If they had been subject to some kind of mysterious electromagnetic damage I'd have thought the 32GB one would have broken as well.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
OK - I have checked the pen drives on a laptop running Windows and they are all working fine there. The difference seems to be that the 3 64GB ones are formatted as NTFS (which isn't being recognised by the latest version of Ubuntu) whereas the 32GB one is formatted as FAT32, and Ubuntu is having no problems with that one. Something must have changed recently with how the operating system handles pen drives because they were all readable 30 days ago, and I haven't used them at all in any machines in the intervening period.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Manfred Hampl
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

What file system are you using on the USB storage?
When you unplug the drive do you use safe remove feature in the OS before you physically unplug it?

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#2

Maybe the system logs provide hints about what is going wrong.
Unplug the stick (if it is plugged in), wait half a minute, plug it in, wait half a minute, and then issue the command

dmesg | tail

What is the output?

Revision history for this message
Mercedes99 (besancon4me) said : 		#3

I always use the unmount command when removing pen drives.
Also see note appended to the original post.

the results for dmesg | tail are:
[10685.709710] usb 2-2: Set SEL for device-initiated U2 failed.
[10690.707951] usb 2-2: Disable of device-initiated U1 failed.
[10690.711583] usb 2-2: Disable of device-initiated U2 failed.
[10690.711596] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[10690.711878] scsi host10: usb-storage 2-2:1.0
[10690.715517] usb 2-2: Set SEL for device-initiated U1 failed.
[10690.719090] usb 2-2: Set SEL for device-initiated U2 failed.
[10691.828186] usb 2-2: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 9 using xhci_hcd
[10696.853839] usb 2-2: Set SEL for device-initiated U2 failed.
[10696.853907] usb 2-2: USB disconnect, device number 9

Revision history for this message
Best Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#4

There are reports on the web with persons getting similar "Set SEL for device-initiated U1 failed" messages and their USB devices not working.

Some advice that they got, and that was working in some of the cases were:

Try USB2 instead or USB3 ports
Disable XHCI in the system BIOS
Upgrade to a higher kernel version (probably not applicable in your case)

Revision history for this message
Mercedes99 (besancon4me) said : 		#5

Thanks Manfred!

That's interesting! I have an NUC Ultra Compact PC which has 2 USB3 ports on the front and two USB3 ports on the back, into one of which I have plugged a 4 socket USB2 hub. Neither of the 2 ports on the front can see the 64GB drives (though they can see other devices) but when I plug the drives into the USB2 hub, there they are!

I'm not tech-savvy enough to know whether changes to the operating system might have changed the way that the ports handle USB2 & USB3, but the pen drives were fine plugged into USB3 last month, whereas this month they seem to have become a bit 'pickier'.

Revision history for this message
Mercedes99 (besancon4me) said : 		#6

Thanks Manfred Hampl, that solved my question.