Genesys gl811e - based usb mass storage

Mike Kallies mike.kallies-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Mar 29 10:59:01 UTC 2007


On 3/28/07, Christopher Friedt <cfriedt-u6hQ6WWl8Q3d1t4wvoaeXtBPR1lH4CV8 at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> This is a bit of a shot in the dark, but I picked up a usb 2.0 hard disk
> enclosure created by a company called 'inLine' in Germany, and it was
> unfortunately not autodetected as a mass storage device with the linux
> kernel (2.6.19).
>
> The exact output from dmesg is:
>
....
> scsi 10:0:0:0: scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
>
> the chip is called 'gl811e' and it supports devices > 137 GB, which is
> apparently a limit of some sort... Anyway, the usb/ide converter is
> non-standard and would force run-time exceptions to be taken for these
> chips.
>
> Any suggestions from kernel developers?

I think I've got the same device.  The gl811e is a tiny little surface
mount chip on the back.

It works for me, but it's very unreliable.  I just dd'd a drive and
had to reboot once because of a "bus error", then on the second
attempt, it failed about 5 times.  dd was kind enough to inform me the
number of the block it failed on so that I could turn it off cold,
then turn it back on and continue roughly where I left off.  BTW, the
thing is just as flakey in the Windows world as the Linux world.

The first one I bought I had to return because it was dead... no
lights, no spin-up, nothing.

The one I have now generally doesn't like it when you hot-plug it.
Try plugging it in, then turning it on, rather than the other way
around.

We use a lot of other USB-IDE converters at the workplace.  For most
of them, the packaging and physical design seems to be really top
notch, but the electronics fail like nothing.

Does anyone know of any reliable ones?  e.g, something you could leave
on all day as a second drive?

-Mike
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list