AAARRRGGGHHH!!! Re: USB CD Burners? - Problem

[aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net]

   From: Brian Chabot <brian at datasquire.net>
   Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:31:15 -0400

   Here's the deal.  Now I attach the drive ,and within SECONDS I get:
   Apr  7 00:21:36 alfred kernel: usb 4-5: USB disconnect, address 4

   WTF?!?

Hm.  Have you checked your IRQs lately?

   The CD burner continues with the last comman it got as if nothing
   happened and my system has processes I can't kill:

   8253 ?        00:00:00 scsi_eh_0
   8254 ?        00:00:00 usb-storage
   8312 ?        00:00:04 k3b
   [root at alfred ~]# kill -s 9 8253
   [root at alfred ~]# kill -s 9 8253
   [root at alfred ~]# kill -s 9 8254

Well, you won't be able to kill a kernel thread... you wouldn't want
to, anyway. :) But k3b *should* die when given a -9.

   A reboot (either a reboot command or an init 6 or 0) now hangs.

   WTF?

I used to have problems like this due to mysterious IRQ confilcts.  One
workaround is to background the commands you type, i.e. instead of:

# kill -9 8253

type

# kill -9 8253 &

at least that way your shell will still respond.  (Even if the kill
never returns.)

Since setting PnP OS = NO in my BIOS, I haven't seen this problem
(much).  I still have these sorts of problems with filesystem ops (due
to problems with reiserfs), but the "&" usually insulates me from
those....

Dave