Comments on: USB frustrations with linux

By: Mercian Labels – Business, Open Source & Security Label Printing » Blog Archive » Solution for Cowan Iaudio “read-only file system” error

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:45:29 +0000

[...] mounting under linux just isnt as forgiving under linux as windows, as I’ve previously blogged abut, and thats a shame. Category: Open Source | Comment (RSS) [...]

By: Julian

Julian — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:59:00 +0000

I can only concur with what’s written above. I have no more problems on Linux with USB devices than windows. My 3G modem is always recognised in linux and works quite well, but in one of my Windows pc’s it refuses to install the drivers properly – on other windows pc’s its fine ….

NTFS support has come a long way on Linux, but yes, reformatting as FAT32 if you have to share it, or just ext3 would be better.

I remember trying USB2 drivers with linux about 5 years ago when they were termed ‘experimentle’ – that was fun, it worked mostly, but absolutely broke the hard drive at last once.

By: The Open Sourcerer

The Open Sourcerer — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:09:51 +0000

Make sure you use the ntfs-3g userspace driver (which I think Ubuntu uses now by default).

But as Paul also said, I see almost zero problems with USB devices on various bits of Linux hardware. (Our work with Elonex and the 3G dongles has given us quite a bit of exposure recently … )

By: Paul Cooper

Paul Cooper — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:39:21 +0000

Weird, since my experience is that ‘standard’ USB devices work flawlessly on Linux and not always flawlessly on other systems. My scanner / printer, phone (to get pictures or hookup 3G), and backup drive (ext3), and portable drive (fat32) are all plugged in and out multiple times a day. All but dialing 3G are automatic.

I guess part of the problem with your external drive is that it’s NTFS which isn’t well supported in my experience – although that doesn’t explain why you have to use a USB1.1 hub. I would just get another external USB drive, they are only slightly more than bare drives typically, and format it as ext3 (or perhaps fat32 if you need to transfer files to Windows/OSX).

I can only assume that the HP laptop has some weird USB controller bug that’s stopping USB keys working.

Feel free to ping me if you need help reformatting your external HD.