umass: AutoSense failed

[Harald Weis]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 04:50:45PM +0000, Adrian Wontroba wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 09:40:05AM -0500, Paul Mather wrote:
> 
> (reformatted)
> > I get something similar to this happening on 8.2-PRERELEASE.  In my
> > case, it's not during boot probing or device attachment.  Instead, it
> > happens occasionally after boot.  The devices concerned are Maxtor
> > OneTouch external USB hard drives.  Every now and then, I will get
> > something akin to the following crop up in the console log:
> >
> > (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): AutoSense failed
> >
> > I have three of these Maxtor OneTouch drives attached to the system as
> > part of a ZFS pool.  When I get an "AutoSense failed" message, it is
> > usually accompanied by the ZFS pool being marked as faulted.
> >
> > The Maxtor OneTouch drives are wont to spin down and go into a
> > deep sleep after a period of inactivity and appear very slow to
> > wake up again when I/O occurs.  I have always assumed that the
> > "AutoSense failed" is associated with this---that there is some kind
> > of timeout in the FreeBSD stack that this device is exceeding.  In
> > fact, sometimes the devices fail to probe properly during boot when
> > they are asleep.
> >
> > This is what the OneTouch normally probes as:
> >
> > da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0 : <Maxtor OneTouch 0121>
> > da0Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device : 40.000MB/s transfers : 953869MB
> > da0(1953525168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121601C)
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Paul.
> 
> I had this happen while backing up to two successive previously reliable
> UFS USB external disk drives.
> 
> Plugging the USB cable into a motherboard USB socket at the back of the
> computer rather than a front panel socket made the problem go away.
> 
> This might cure the OP's problem too.

Okay, that's easy to test. I just did it.

The AutoSense failure occurs on two desktop computers, whether
motherboard or not, and on three laptops. As I said, all PC's
run 8.1-RELEASE.
What I do not know is whether the Sony DSC (Digital Still Camera) has
worked on 8.0-RELEASE. I didn't use it for some time, so I'm afraid
I never tried it on 8.x.
But I am sure it worked on all earlier releases.
In my original post I have forgotten to mention that I never had any
problems with all sorts of thumbdrives and USB disks.
Fortunately, I can read the 256MB CF memory of the DSC on an Ubuntu
laptop.
Could it possibly be a DSC hardware problem which is ignored by Ubuntu,
but not by FreeBSD?

Anyway, I should now follow Jeremy's proposal and check with a livefs CD,
but this will take a bit more time...

But before, I'll plug the DSC into a MacPro which I can access over the
weekend and report the result here.

Thanks to all of you.
Harald