USB 3.0 portable drive not detected

I have a 1TB USB 3.0 verbatim portable drive. When I connect it to my IBM Thinkpad R500 OpenSUSE 11.4 does not detect the drive as being plugged in. All my USB 2 devices work fine. Do I need to configure something to get this drive going?

I use a USB 3.0 drive mounted from my fstab file and it works fine. There was a problem that came up with USB drives being recognized when plugged in after boot. Here is a link for that issue:

Might want to look at this, just to make sure it is not the same problem.

Automount of external NTFS USB drive fails when using the Device Notifier

I also ran into one person that was trying to boot froim a USB 3.0 drive, not normally possible due to BIOS limitations, but this procedure does not hurt to be applied:

  1. Boot from a LiveCD AFTER you have installed openSUSE properly, but where it does not boot into openSUSE properly.

  2. 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 /

  1. Use VI or other text editor (Look up the VI editor command first) and edit the file /etc/sysconfig/kernel (or jump here and edit the file as root with any editor when not trying to boot from a USB 3.0 drive)

  2. 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:

INITRD_MODULES=“xhci-hcd pata_jmicron ata_generic thermal processor fan”

Your line will likely be different than mine.

  1. 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.

If you are NOT trying to boot from a USB 3.0 drive, but would like to add the xhci-hcd to Initrd, then go straight to item #3 in a normal running session of openSUSE.

Thank You,