That's the model name given on the base of the laptop. It was also advertised as such by a number of retailers, now probably two or three years old...bigpup wrote:At Toshiba support I could not find a listing for A500-02Fotropogo wrote:Satellite A500 -02Fbigpup wrote:otropogo,
What is the model of your Toshiba laptop?
There are only two USB ports, both V2.0. Don't know about eSATA/USB.They have A500-ST5601 thru ST5608 and a bunch of other ST numbers.
However all A500-models seem to have same basic specs.
By Toshiba's spec sheet on this computer you have:
4 USB V2.0 ports
3 V2.0
1 v2.0 eSATA/USB combo port with USB sleep and charge.
I'm connecting my USB3.0 drives through a two port USB3.0 PCI-expressbus adapter. And I've been "testing" and reporting lupu problems with USB3.0 support for many months now, and have tested every conceivable way.So, I assume you are using a USB v3.0 add on hub and I hope it is self powering.
I also assume this USB v3.0 add on hub is designed to hook to USB V2.0 and give USB V3.0 access.
First I would make sure you are not connecting to this USB combo port.
For testing I would only have one USB drive hooked up.
The USB3.0 issues I described don't appear under Slacko, nor other Linux distros, nor in Windows7.
I anticipated this problem from studying specs and reviews of USB3.0 adapters and drives, and so made sure that both the PCI-expressbus adapter and the USB drives I bought have their own power supply. It's a fairly trivial problem to overcome, but unfortunately this product line has been very poorly professionally reviewed. It's essential to buy an expresscard adapter that has a separate power jack. Such adapters generally come with a USB power cable which gets power from one of the laptop's existing USB2.0 ports - a horrible kludge. Sometimes the only hint of this is when the product description warns that the laptop must have an available USB2.0 port.This works sometimes does not work sometimes is hard to debug.
One thought is power output from USB port could cause issues with non self powered devices.
Being a laptop, not sure how power is feed to ports and how much a device needs.
Some such adapters come with two ports but no power jack, so one USB3.0 port has to be sacrificed to bringing extra power from a USB2.0 port! Apparently there are even adapters that have only one USB3.0 port and no power jack. In that case, if the device demands more power than the expresscard adapter can supply, it won't work reliably. Specs on these power supply issues aren't generally available.
However, if the adapter has the jack, it's a simple matter to get an AC/DC adapter with 5V output and a standard USB2.0 jack to power it. Larger drives, like my 3TB Goflex should (and do) have their own AC power adapter.
In any case, lack of power isn't an issue in the issues I described.
Pmount has gone badly downhill since Puppy 2xx and 3xxx. MUT used to show the swap file, but no longer. Now pmount often can't tell the size of a partition and gets it outrageously wrong , and as described above, can't display some storage devices at all, even though they're iconized on the desktop and can be accessed via the icon. Having two burners on the system often confuses it very badly too.I have sometimes seen problems with Pmount not working so good. No clue why. I have had to do a complete power off reboot to fix. Seems to me Pmount does not adjust to changes very well. What it sees on initial boot is what it wants to see all the time.
The ntfs read-only problem is the most maddening though, being totally unpredictable, and existing only in lupu, and only with USB storage devices, so far as I've seen. Other linux distros either don't support ntfs-3g at all (no driver - such as Centos), or support ntfs read-only all the time, and on all storage devices, whether internal hard drive partitions or USB devices. In the case of Centos, it's simply a matter of installing the current ntfs-3g package to fix the problem.
The problem with lupu 528 seems to be simply a defective bundled ntfs-3g module, and the lack of a pet for the newer version that actually works.
The defects of the USB3.0 driver are certainly annoying, but one can live with them with proper care and planning (don't ever jiggle the expresscard adapter, for instance, and always remember to have your adapter and drives connected and powered up when booting Lupu). The ntfs read-only problem is a disaster by comparison. It's far easier and more effective to shut down Lupu and boot into Windows to do a large USB3.0 file transfer than to try it with Lupu.