freeze / lock up when plugging in any USB device

[Les]

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 01:26 -0800, Les wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 10:32 +0800, Cooper Strange wrote:
> > > I can only speak for myself.  I haven't had any USB weirdness (yet).
> > > Therefore, not having the problem, and not seeing enough to let me
> > > have any idea of the source of your problem, I just couldn't
> > > comment.  I suspect that many of the others are in that same place. 
> > > No one can fix what is not broke, and on our systems there don't
> > > appear to be any problems (yet).
> > 
> > I see your point. Bummer. The trouble is that the way I have things 
> > set up, I cannot use those computers without using USBs because I 
> > travel a lot and switch between computers a lot.
> > 
> > My e-mail is all on a USB thumb drive, and I found out last night 
> > there is no way (I can find) to use that on the computer. Even when I 
> > use the proper device address (shown on the laptop's FC6 for the 
> > thumb drive) /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda5, I cannot manually mount a thumb 
> > drive. I can mount only an external hard drive manually. My thumb 
> > drive and multi-card reader cannot be found. Basically, this means I 
> > cannot use my desktop.
> > 
> > You said that you do not see enough to see the source of the problem. 
> > Is there anything I can do to search out the possibilities? Thanks so 
> > much for your comments. It is nice to hear from somebody.
> > 
> There are many things that can cause USB problems.  If the thumb drives
> are working on another system, you might try looking for the usb support
> to make sure you have it installed and running.  My system just loaded
> and ran, and I am also a relative noob on Linux and Fedora (about 2
> months now.)
> 	
> 	I just discovered that my printer queue had stopped, (my printer is on
> USB) so maybe I have a problem also.  I will have to get back to you.
> 
> Regards,
> Les H
> 
My USB cleaned up with a reboot.  I have been messing about with lots of
things in the OS to see what works, what breaks, where things are, and
how they interact, so right now breaks and overflows, and missing files
are quite common on my system, not because of Fedora, but because that
is how I learn how things work.  I mess 'em up and then see if I can get
them working again.  I am making progress.

	On your USB problem.  Check if the /usr/share/doc/usbutils-0.71
directory exists.  If so, then your usb stuff was loaded.  Then verify
that you have only one device plugged directly into the USB prot on your
machine.  The USB ports will supply about 1A of current.  Generally this
is shared across all the ports.  If one port is hogging the current,
there may not be enough to comfortably drive your thumb drive.  So if it
still doesn't work with a single device, then you will need to do some
H/W trouble shooting.  Make sure that the other sockets are empty and
then add one device at a time.  When the system quits recognizing
devices, you have to expect some hardware may be bad.  check the
system's power supplies to make sure the 5 and 12 volts are correct.
then trace the issue down to the offending hardware and/or software by
adding one bit at a time.

Regards,
Les H