WD My Book doesn't properly unmount on PC shutdown

Bug #311771 reported by Nash
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ubuntu
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I have clear install of Ubuntu 8.10 and Western Digital My Book Studio II with NTFS connected via FireWire through
01:08.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306 Fire II IEEE 1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller (rev 46)

When Gnome session starts it properly mount external drive. If you won't access My Book it may "stand by" after some time.
When My Book is "stand by" and you will shut down PC, My Books filesystem will not properly unmount and it cause data loss.
(Because it didn't spin up before PC shut down)

Nash (pouchin-mail)
description: updated
description: updated
Nash (pouchin-mail)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Stefan Richter (stefan-r-ubz) wrote :

The Western Digital FireWire disks have some non-standard power savings features which WD apparently tested only with some Windows PCs without care for compliance to the SCSI specs or IEEE 1394 specs.

Are there any messages in the system log from when the system tries to unmount the disk, e.g. SCSI errors? (I am not a Ubuntu user myself, hence don't know into which log file you should look. It is typically /var/log/messages.)

What happens if you manually unmount the disk after it went into standby? Does anything interesting appear in the output of "dmesg" then?

Revision history for this message
Nash (pouchin-mail) wrote :

Just tried to unmount mounted r/o standby WD disk.
No error messages and disk doesn't went online.
Just warning like "ntfs3-g: /dev/sdc1 unmount" in syslog.

Revision history for this message
Stefan Richter (stefan-r-ubz) wrote :

Well, unmounting a read-only filesystem may very well go through without any SCSI request...

Anyway. Maybe the WD My Book does not handle the SCSI START STOP UNIT command like the Linux SCSI core expects. You could try adding a device quirks workaround which influences the parameters for this SCSI command. You can activate this workaround ad hoc by
# modprobe sbp2
# echo 0x20 > /sys/module/sbp2/parameters/workarounds
Then plug the disk in.

You can enable this workaround permanently, i.e. persistent after any reboots and startups, by
# echo "options sbp2 workarounds=0x20" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options

But another reason could be that the WD My Book returns wrong SCSI status if it gets commands while in standby, leading the kernel's SCSI core to believe that all was fine and it hadn't to send START STOP UNIT at all. Then I don't see what could be done about it.

Revision history for this message
David Tombs (dgtombs) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

Changed in ubuntu:
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

Changed in ubuntu:
status: Incomplete → Invalid
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