OneAndOneIs2

...to be this stupid.

I have a 40GB USB hard drive. Huge amounts of stuff are on it - all my coursework for university, for starters. I plugged it to my desktop to get something off it, and nothing happened. Other than the power light lighting up, no icon on the desktop, no window showing the file contents.. nothing.

Uh-oh.

But hey. I'm a geek, let's not panic. This is probably a software glitch, not hardware failure. And they can be dealt with.. let's see what dmesg has to say.

[175513.646532] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 7
[175513.830370] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175514.106104] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175514.381851] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 8
[175514.565682] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175514.853410] usb 1-3: device descriptor read/64, error -62
[175515.133150] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 9
[175515.540767] usb 1-3: device not accepting address 9, error -62
[175515.716603] usb 1-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 10
[175516.124229] usb 1-3: device not accepting address 10, error -62

Yep. Software. No problem.

If this were Windows, it'd be the ubiquitous solution: Shut everything down, reboot, and it'll be fixed.

But it isn't, it's Linux. The USB drivers are modules, so just reload the modules and they're "rebooted" without losing anything else.

I've done this exact thing before, when I was trying to get suspend-to-RAM working and it broke USB. rmmod, modprobe, and boom, it's back up.

So off we go:
rmmod ohci_hcd

So far so good
modprobe ohci_hcd

Umm...

modpr...
mod...
m
mmmmmmmmmm

Oh, for...

What had I forgotten?

Go on, guess.

Yep. I had forgotten that my keyboard and mouse are both plugged in via USB. Which I had just disabled. And couldn't re-enable without typing a command..

Catch-22. Bugger. This is why I hate USB mice and keyboards. The PS/2 ports are there for a REASON!

Okay, we can fix this: My desktop is still running SSH, just connect from my laptop and reload the module remotely.

Only.. I don't know the IP address on my new home LAN. How to find out where I'm SSH-ing to?

Let's try the Trinity approach: nmap

nmap -sP 192.168.1.1-255

Ah, there it is! Right. SSH time at last, and modprobe ohci_hcd

And my keyboard lives again!

And, at long last, I plug in my hard drive and it opens.

Sigh.

Five minutes to fix something as simple as a slightly-buggy driver. Next time, remind me to use the "&&" operator or something..