DIY for new USB devices

Mepis 3.3.1 didnt auto-detect my Wolverine SixPac 6000 series storage device. This started me on a detailed trace and I finally fixed the lookup tables to detect and mount my device. I am summarizing my fixes here.

I first connected my device to get its vendor and product id. dmesg showed that my device was being detected as a scsi storage device. I noted the vendor and product id from lsusb:

<br />
$ lsusb<br />
...<br />
Bus 001 Device 031: ID 0d7d:1270 Phison Electronics Corp.<br />

Then I looked up /usr/share/hwdata/usb.ids to see if this pair was registered. The vendor was registered but the product id was not. I entered the code and the product name just below that of 1240.

</p>
<p>$ grep -A 23 ^0d7d /usr/share/hwdata/usb.ids<br />
0d7d  Phison Electronics Corp.<br />
        0100  PS1001/1011/1006/1026 Flash Disk<br />
        0110  Gigabyte FlexDrive<br />
        0240  I/O Magic Drive<br />
        110E  NEC uPD720121/130 USB-ATA/ATAPI Bridge<br />
        1240  Apacer 6-in-1 Card Reader 2.0<br />
        1300  Flash Disk<br />
        1320  PS2031 Flash Disk<br />
        1420  PS2044 Pen Drive<br />

I entered the product name into this file. meauto(1) successfully picked up the product name and added it to /etc/sysconfig/usb.

Next I listed /proc/scsi/scsi to get the description strings:

<br />
$ cat /proc/scsi/scsi<br />
...<br />
Host: scsi27 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00<br />
  Vendor: USB      Model: USB              Rev: 2.01<br />
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02<br />

I edited /etc/mefstab.conf to add the following mapping:

<br />
device sixpac {<br />
   match hd "USB USB"<br />
}<br />

where the match string combines Vendor and Model values. Wolverine SixPac 6000 series offers the entire disk as a single FAT32 partition, so I left the partition at its default of 0. fdisk -l will just print garbage as it doesnt have a partition table.

I ran mefstab to verify the device getting added to /etc/fstab. Subsequently, just plugging in the device would make it pop up in Devices list. I am able to successfully mount and write to it. I get I/O errors when doing large writes . That is a topic for another note.

For devices with partitions (like Sony Microvault), the device entry has to be modified to include the partitions:

<br />
device microvault {<br />
   partition 1<br />
   match hd "Sony Storage Device"<br />
}<br />

If more than one microvault is connected they would pop up as /mnt/microvault1 and so on.

Hope this helps.