Resolution of The LaCIE "Big Disk" issue

[Jon maddog Hall]

dragonhawk at gmail.com said:
>   While that will probably give you problems, the probable problems will
> probably be different ones... ;-)

And with that having been said, Ben found enough information to let me piece
together what really happened.

>   I suspect it's just typical USB/ATA bridge device flakyness.  They all seem
> to be a bit persnickity, in my experience.  Indeed, Googling for "TUSB6250
> Boot Device" finds the following, which suggest your problem has nothing to
> do with Linux:

> http://www.lacie.com/support/faq/faq.htm?faqid=10285

> http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literatureNumber=slla12
> 6&fileType=pdf

> In particular, the TUSB6250 USB/ATA bridge chip your hardware apparently
> uses will apparently expose a low-level interface (for factory programming,
> etc.) as "TUSB6250 Boot Device".  That's an interface to the bridge chip, not
> the hard drive attached to the chip.
>  So once you managed to reset the bridge chip, all was well.  Until it flakes
> out again, of course. 

According to the TI documentation, the bridge chip first becomes active and
contacts the host USB controller for some firmware. My USB controller could
probably not handle this at the time, since it did not have the ehci_hcd driver
autoloading.  The bridge chip never got its information, therefore looked
"dumb", with the Interface class and Sub Class not filled in.

Eventually I got the driver to load (and loading nicely, thank you).  Then
I turned on the device and the bridge chip got its firmware, filled in the
proper Class and Subclass, and everything was happy.

Now, IF I had followed the instructions in the manual and had:

	o Plugged in the power to the drive first
	o Turned the drive on with the blue button
	o Plugged in the USB cable to the drive first
	o Plugged in the USB cable to the computer

it *MAY* have worked first time, but I will never know unless I buy another
one.  Yes, they tell you to do that step-by-step.  Silly me, I thought plugging
in the power to the drive last would be the safest thing to do.  and it may
be....just not the first time.

By the way, the TI documentation of their firmware start-up process was great.
It even had flow charts.  I can not remember the last time I saw a flow chart.
I think it was when I was teaching CS over twenty years ago.

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
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