I've been having problems with my external usb drives used on my mythtv backend. The drives are no longer being recognized on bootup. This started happening after I added additional 500GB and 1TB drives to the system when there was already a 500GB drive. All of the drives are USB attached MyBooks. The 1TB drive cannot be plugged into the system at all on reboot or the hardware fails to come up. So this may be at least partially related to the bios on that board or maybe the board itself is flaking out.
I've unplugged the 1TB drive and plugged in only one of the 500GB drives (the one that was working). I then booted the system and manually unplugged the power to the 2nd 500GB drive, waited 30 seconds and plugged the power back in, then plugged in the drive to the USB. The drive is at least seen by the USB subsystem but it is not auto-mounted like it should be. I thought maybe the drive label was trashed so I checked that with e2label. The label is correct. So now I'm running fsck on the drive to see what that does.
During the fsck I got the following message in /var/log/messages:
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=1100
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: Product: My Book
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: Manufacturer: western digital
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 57442D574341533831303635383533
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Oct 18 14:43:56 genm kernel: scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB mass storage devices
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD 5000AAJ External 1.65 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors: (500 GB/465 GiB)
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sdd: sdd1
Oct 18 14:44:01 genm kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
Oct 18 14:46:07 genm ntpd[1532]: synchronized to 207.171.7.151, stratum 2
Oct 18 14:48:47 genm kernel: usb 1-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
At this point it looks like the drive is not being accessed anymore – the drive lights are not flashing. It looks like the USB is not happy with my drives. I can verify if the USB hardware on the mobo is dying by moving the drive to another system and seeing if I can fsck them there. Fortunately I have lots of other systems I can try this on.
I've been thinking that maybe I should switch to internal SATA drives instead. The reason for using external drives was to reduce the heat inside the backend because the box sits in my office at home and that is an upstairs room that gets very hot in the summer (and even winter if the air vent is not closed). It gets so hot that I've lost hardware in there before. I used to run a fan to blow air over the servers just to keep air circulating. I haven't done that recently, however.
What I really want to do is move all the servers to the basement, where it's nice and chilly all year round. The problem is that the cable modem is in the upstairs office and I don't want to run cables through the walls to move it downstairs. All I need is to run one CAT-5 cable from the cable modem to the wireless router in the basement and all will be well, but I can't figure out an easy way to do that. I hate running wires through walls between floors. Alternatively, I could move the cable modem to the basement with all my hardware (and move myself down there too – my new office) and hope my wife's Mac will be happy with wireless again instead of being hardwired like it is now.
Sigh. I wish all my hardware just worked forever. But no such luck.
update: 2009-10-18
I fsck'd both the 1TB and the non-working 500GB on another system. They both worked fine there. I put them back and currently both drives appear to be working. The question will be: how long with they continue to work.