Comment 20 for bug 54419

Yet another case. It just started happening to me: I've been running Edgy on this machine since shortly after it released, and I use external usb-storage devices (cameras and mp3 players) at least every couple of days, without any problems until today.

A few days ago I dist-upgraded and picked up some seemingly innocuous packages: gnupg_1.4.3, tzdata_2007b, mozilla-thunderbird, tcpdump_3.9.4, libxine-main1_1.1.2, libxine1_1.1.2. None of these seem like they could possibly have any effect on the kernel, udev or hal. Yet now, when I plug in my camera or mp3 player (to either a usb2 hub or a usb1 hub, both of which have worked in the past), I get various error messages in dmesg (a little different each time) and /dev/sde either isn't created, or it's created briefly but as soon as anything tries to read from it (e.g. to read the partition table and create sde1), the device disappears again.

It's sde because I have a built-in multicard reader (cf, sm, ms, sd/mmc) which takes up sda through d. The four usb multicard devices are seen at boot time and work just fine. It's just hotplugged devices that don't work.

Kernel is 2.6.17-11-generic (but the problems happen with -10 too). lspci says the USB controller is a Via VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81).

After googling and finding lots of people with similar problems and reading their workarounds, I tried modprobe -r ehci_hcd followed by modprobe ehci_hcd, and that worked -- this time, but the pages I found suggest it won't be a reliable fix. And nobody seems to have come up with a way to get the system to do this on its own (well, I suppose I could add a line like
modprobe -r ehci_hcd; sleep 10; modprobe ehci_hcd
to one of the boot scripts, but ick).

Attaching a log of dmesg snippets.

If anyone comes up with an explanation for why this might have suddenly started happening, or suggestions for good automated ways of solving it, I'd be most grateful!