Comment 23 for bug 54419

To anyone still fighting this bug, I might have a clue. I just upgraded to Feisty to see if the bug might be fixed. I plugged in an mp3 player which had almost always triggered the "dead device" I/O errors in edgy, then checked dmesg.

It didn't show up as sde as it should have -- but it gave a much more helpful error message. Like a dufus I forgot to write down the exact error message, and now I'm no longer seeing it, but it had something to do with "not enough power." All my testing has been through unpowered hubs. That was never a problem in the past, but maybe the kernel has become more picky about that recently.

I found a power connector for my USB2 hub, plugged it in, and now the device seems to be working under feisty. We'll see if it keeps working; but anyone still having this problem, try using a powered hub or no hub at all.