System halts on USB keychain drive insertion

[richter]

When I boot up Knoppix 3.3 on CD, everything goes fine unless I have the USB drive inserted. If I have it inserted at boot, it hangs when it's detecting partitions and updating fstab. If I don't insert it, it will boot as normal. If I insert it once fully booted up, it will hang after a short period. Before it hangs here, I can do a dmesg and it shows the device being detected. It hasn't shown up in fstab at this point. By hanging I mean that I lose all control of mouse and keyboard, capslock doesn't even respond. Screen freezes.

The USB drive I have is the SanDisk Cruzer Mini 256MB. This drive works perfectly well under Debian stable using the usb-storage module. I have tried this with more than one computer with identical results. I've looked through the FAQ and google'd around for a few hours, nothing. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[robiwan]

Hi there,
I use Knoppix 3.2 and 3.3 and have the same problem. I try to save my harddisk to an USB-storage Maxtor 500LE with the following command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/sda1/hda.img
But after a short time the system hang totally. The only way is to switch off the power supply.

But i got a Knoppix 3.0 and this old Version works fine.
I estimate the parallel support from UHCI and OHCI since KNOPPIX 3.1 reported in ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/knoppix/KNOPPIX-CHANGELOG.txt is the reason.

[richter]

Interesting. Where could I locate a copy of 3.0? I'd certainly like to try that until this current bug gets resolved. Thanks for the response.

[fingers99]

I use a smaller usb flash drive in 3.2 (KNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-06-06-EN.iso) and it works just fine. 3.1 worked fine, too. You'll be able -- I think -- to snag one or the other from somewhere.

[richter]

I was playing around with it some more, the problem appears to be stemming from the autofs service. If I turn that off, then insert the usb drive, I can manually bring the drive up by inserting the usb-uhci, usb-storage, and usb-core modules. This works fine, but doesn't bring me any closer to persistent home directories :)