USB outage in Dell 700m
Gentoo February 6th, 2006
It was just a little annoying when I found the USB mouse stopped working , touchpad outage happens before. Then I plugged the usb jumpdrive to the usb port, it was supposed to be automounted by ivman to /media/usbdisk, but the magic does not happen, and I got the following messages in the log:
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:24 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
Feb 6 15:43:24 puma usb 4-1: device not accepting address 4, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:24 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
Feb 6 15:43:25 puma usb 4-1: device not accepting address 5, error -71
I sweated. Were the USB ports still alive? To make things more clear, I rebooted the machine with Gentoo 2005.1 LiveCD, still no luck. OMG, the warranty of this laptop had been expired, I might need a bulky PCMCIA usb adpater for all USB devices if I did not want to replace the motherboard. Let’s have the finial shoot, rebooted the machine with Dell dignoise disc, run the “USB test”, all test passed. I felt a little reliefed, then reboot the machine to Linux, the USB ports revived. What a miracle !
Dell 700m always gives me some surprises. Do they think this would make our life more colorful?
I’ve hit this too, and you don’t need to reboot to fix it. Removing and re-loading the USB driver / kernel module works for me:
sudo rmmod uhci_hcd
sudo rmmod ehci_hcd
sudo modprobe uhci_hcd
Careful if you’re relying on an external USB mouse/keyboard because this will disable them temporarily. In that case, make it a script file.