Resolution of The LaCIE "Big Disk" issue

[Ben Scott]

On 7/10/06, Jon maddog Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
> 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.

  Hmmm.  The thing is, that firmware would be specific to the TI
bridge chip.  I doubt there's device-specific firmware in the Linux
EHCI driver.  I also doubt Windoze users would be expected to manage
loading firmware themselves.

  My guess as to what happened: Something caused the peripheral to
flake out during startup, so the bridge reverted to programming mode
in case someone with the needed tools wanted to debug it.  In the
process of your fiddling with it, you caused a reset, and it didn't
flake out that time.

> ... I thought plugging in the power to the drive last would be the safest thing to do...

  Perhaps the fact that it saw a USB connection at power on caused the
bridge chip to go into programming mode for some reason.  Of course,
that still wouldn't explain *why*.

-- Ben