Certain external USB drives not recognized after Manjaro update

Greetings,

I recently did the most recent Feb 3 update on Manjaro stable, and everything went smoothly - except for my pluggable USB drives (plugged into a powered external hub). The drives, and the hub, worked perfectly before this update.

Strangely enough, the hub itself is working otherwise:

  • My USB webcam works and is detected with lsusb
  • FAT32 formatted USB thumbdrives are detected and auto-mount like usual
  • USB accessories plugged into the hug receive full 5V power

Again, what isn’t working anymore are:

  • My NTFS formatted USB stick
  • My ext4 formatted USB hard drive

Note that both the stick AND the drive above work perfectly when plugged into my Linux Mint laptop and on my Windows 10 machine.

I have also tried the following to fix this issue, which didn’t work:

  • Switched USB ports that the hub is plugged into on my PC
  • Downgraded my Kernel from 6.1.9 to the 5.15 LTS kernel
  • Checked BIOS and XHCI and EHCI are both enabled (like before)

I cannot understand what happened, and why the hub only doesn’t work on these particular storage devices, but continues to work with all other USB devices (and even FAT32 USB drives).

Launch a terminal and run

udevadm monitor

Plug the alledegdly non working devices directly into your system.

Open a second terminal and run lsusb to list available devices.

Provide the output from the terminal (using copy paste - with code fence </> from the toolbar)

If you get your devices listed then your issue is with the usb hub.

hi aarhus -

I ran the command then plugged in my drives. The command seems to have no output, even after waiting 15 minutes - just flashing cursor.

udevadm monitor                                                  ✔ 
monitor will print the received events for:
UDEV - the event which udev sends out after rule processing
KERNEL - the kernel uevent

Then, second terminal with lsusb reads:

Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 007 Device 005: ID 045b:0209 Hitachi, Ltd 
Bus 007 Device 004: ID 045b:0209 Hitachi, Ltd 
Bus 007 Device 003: ID 1bcf:0005 Sunplus Innovation Technology Inc. Optical Mouse
Bus 007 Device 002: ID 1235:8211 Focusrite-Novation Scarlett Solo (3rd Gen.)
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 003: ID 1ea7:0077 SHARKOON Technologies GmbH Mechanical Keyboard
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 048d:8295 Integrated Technology Express, Inc. ITE Device(8595)
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0a2b Intel Corp. Bluetooth wireless interface
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 2433:b200 ASETEK [NZXT Kraken X60]
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

lsusb is not showing my plugged in device at all (Sandisk USB pen drive).

Any other ideas?

I didn’t think it would fix it - it would point you in a direction.

When you plug a device you will - depending on device - some output e.g. an sdcard plugged into a card reader

 $ udevadm monitor
monitor will print the received events for:
UDEV - the event which udev sends out after rule processing
KERNEL - the kernel uevent

KERNEL[1045.172875] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde (block)
KERNEL[1045.179350] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde (block)
KERNEL[1045.179396] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde/sde1 (block)
KERNEL[1045.179427] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde/sde2 (block)
UDEV  [1045.276238] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde (block)
UDEV  [1045.365988] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde (block)
UDEV  [1045.461877] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde/sde1 (block)
UDEV  [1045.486082] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:02:00.0/0000:03:08.0/0000:04:00.3/usb8/8-4/8-4:1.0/host11/target11:0:0/11:0:0:1/block/sde/sde2 (block)

Did you remove the hub and plug the devices directly into the system?

Test your ports to locate if some is working and some is not.

hi again aarhus,

Okay, I went ahead and did some testing, firstly by following your recommendation to try plugging in my drives into the non-hub USB ports - directly to the motherboard.

Wala, the drives worked. But - when plugged into the USB hub - still no detection at all.

I therefore wanted to investigate further, so I booted into a Linux Mint thumbdrive using the same PC. Again - hub wasn’t recognizing my USB drives, but recognized everything else (including the thumbdrive itself formatted as FAT32).

I then removed the USB hub and plugged it in, unpowered, to my LMDE 5 laptop - and plugged in my USB drives. Both drives were instantly detected.

So, that narrowed down the culprit to my specific PC - specifically the motherboard. Booted up and went to the BIOs and noticed that my BIOS had IOMMU set to “AUTO.” I set it instead to “ENABLED” and rebooted.

Got into Manjaro, plugged in all of my drives to the USB HUB and guess what…everything working perfectly as it was 1 month ago.

So, problem solved, but I don’t understand how the hub and my drives were working 1 month ago, and then suddenly, after a Manjaro update, the behavior of my USB hub between my motherboard has changed. My best theory would be somehow the firmware on the hub itself was affected between updates and/or my motherboard went nuts.

I also noticed that my BIOS is/was a whopping 6 years old. Updated it to latest version, everything still works.

Thanks for your assistance and guidance that led to this investigation, leading to a solution.

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