USB drives still don't work correctly

[Donald Allen]

I have tried periodically to use FreeBSD -- a couple of the 7.x
releases, 8.0 and now 8.1. I do my backups on Seagate SATA drives in
USB shoeboxes with ext2 filesystems. These drives work fine with Linux
(Slackware) and OpenBSD. But with FreeBSD, absolutely no luck. The 7.x
releases would freeze or crash. The much-needed reimplementation of
the USB layer in 8.x gave me new hope, but I'm still experiencing
problems.

I have 8.1 RELEASE installed on a Thinkpad G41, an old system I use
for experimenting. When I plug in one of the USB drives directly to
the machine, I get  the following in /var/log/messages:

Sep 22 09:53:10 elektra kernel: ugen3.2: <Sunplus Technology Inc.> at usbus3
Sep 22 09:53:10 elektra kernel: umass0: <Bulk Only Interface> on usbus3
Sep 22 09:53:10 elektra kernel: umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x4000
Sep 22 09:53:10 elektra root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x04fc
product 0x0c15 bus uhub3
Sep 22 09:53:12 elektra kernel: umass0:0:0:-1: Attached to scbus0
Sep 22 09:53:37 elektra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): AutoSense failed
Sep 22 09:53:37 elektra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): got CAM status 0x10
Sep 22 09:53:37 elektra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): fatal error,
failed to attach to device
Sep 22 09:53:37 elektra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): lost device
Sep 22 09:53:47 elektra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): AutoSense failed
Sep 22 09:53:47 elektra kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): removing device entry

After the above, if I remove the USB connector and plug it back in, X
freezes (the cursor moves with the mouse, but no response to clicks,
or to keyboard gestures) until I remove the connector.

Interestingly, if I plug the drive in prior to booting the system, the
system recognizes it properly and I can mount it and display its root
directory. So there is a workaround. But after all this time that I've
been trying to use FreeBSD and all the effort that's gone into getting
the USB layer right, it's discouraging to still be running into issues
like this. Hopefully, one of you will have a bright (configuration?)
idea that will allow me to use the USB drives as I do on other
systems, without the need for the reboot workaround.

Thanks --

/Don Allen