I’ve been trying to get the USB 3.0 port working on my laptop, but the most I got it was until the first reboot or working with randoms disconnections. One thing to note is that I have a dual boot with Win7 and I have no problems at all there. Also, I connect an external keyboard to the port so when choosing what to boot from grub, I can navigate with the external keyboard so… the port is working fine! Problem is the linux kernel I guess. Here is what I tried:
First, of course, tried to get info on this and similar models of my notebook ( G53, G73)
Tried the option “pci = monsi” in the grub file menu.lst No luck.
Tried the default kernel instead of the desktop one, but nothing changed.
Tried Tumbleweed with the last kernel 2.6.39.1-32, and when the machine boots, I can see a very early error related to xhci and port recognition, but I cannot tell for sure what it was (sorry, still newbie in many things). Then I read somewhere that early xhci-hcd versions had a bug with port reset, so a kernel update should fix that! …but wait a minute, I was running the very last one available! mmmm…
Well, those were my tries. I really don’t need USB3 speeds as I don’t have an external USB 3 drive, but the thing is that I do need the port! So if anybody can help me in how to recover it, with 2.0 speeds, I’ll be totally thankful!
Also, I know that I could be not very “technical” in describing my problem. I somebody want’s me to try a couple of commands in order to have some diagnosis… let me know! It would be good for me too to learn
Just a note about USB 3. I have yet to use a computer where you could select a hard drive connected to a USB 3 port to boot from in your BIOS. Now, that being said, one user claimed to have that ability on a laptop. We determined that the ability to boot from a USB 3 port was not included in initrd and needed to be added. So, here is the instructions to do that.
Boot from a LiveCD AFTER you have installed openSUSE properly, but where it does not boot into openSUSE properly.
Open Up a terminal session and execute the following commands:
mkdir /mnt/sysimage
mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/sysimage
chroot /mnt/sysimage
NOTE: X=disk name as in a, b, c or d AND Y=1, 2, 3 or 4 as to partition number. Ex:sdb1 where you have installed the main or root openSUSE partition called /
Use VI or other text editor (Look up the VI editor command first) and edit the file /etc/sysconfig/kernel
In the text file called kernel look for the line that starts with INITRD_MODULES=" and add the name xhci-hcd to the line and save the file. For instances, here is what my line says with this option added:
Issue the following terminal commands after you have edited the above text file called kernel located in the folder /etc/sysconfig/
mount -tproc none /proc
mkinitrd
This should create a new image in the /boot folder that might be named: initrd-2.6.37.1-1.2-desktop and is being loaded in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
Thank you very much for your reply! I will give it a try and let you know how it was. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it would be so complicated to get a USB port to work! My question now is: What would happen in the next kernel update? Should I do the 6 steps again in order to update the initrd image? or this should be only one time?
Thank you very much for your reply! I will give it a try and let you know how it was. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it would be so complicated to get a USB port to work! My question now is: What would happen in the next kernel update? Should I do the 6 steps again in order to update the initrd image? or this should be only one time?
Thanks a lot once again for the help and time!
Well, this is my canned answer for anyone who is trying to boot from a USB 3 port/drive. If you can boot openSUSE from a different drive, the procedure would be much simpler as you would jump straight to option 3. Also, while there was a problem with the kernel in openSUSE 11.3 and USB 3, that is not the case with openSUSE 11.4. And so it does not hurt to apply this procedure in any case and see if it helps but I am not sure what else might be the matter with your USB 3 support.
Well, yes after reading a couple of times… I guessed that I could omit some steps :P. I added the xhci-hcd to the kernel file… but it didn’t worked, so I’m still in the same situation.