Dell Backup Plus portable 1TB not detected on PogoPlug Mobile under Debian Squeeze/Wheezy but working from u-boot

I've a pogoplug mobile, I followed http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,11663,page=1 and installed Davy's mmc support u-boot. I've one SD Card with Davy's Squeeze rootfs and one with shv's Wheezy rootfs - both booting great from SD card and working fine with my existing USB Flash drives and USB Transcend casing with 120GB hard drive.

I bought a Dell Backup plus 1TB which looks basically a re-branded Seagate hard drive and tried to use that with my Pogoplug, but the HDD LED won't light up and also the hard disk won't work.

Under Squeeze, even lsusb won't show anything other than USB Hub, but Wheezy showed USB Hub and another device from Dell Computer Comp. - but the hard disk won't populate in /dev - on googling for 413c:9013 (VID:PID of Dell hard drive) I found another user having problems with this on an older Ubuntu version with similar error messages in dmesg (Device offlined - not ready after error recovery)

On some further debugging through replacement, I found there is no problem with the hard drive inside the enclosure / the Dell enclosure / the USB cable (of course - it works perfect on my PC with Mint 14 & Win7) - any combination of these peripherals gave the same issue on my PogoPlug Mobile with Debian Wheezy.

Now, since I've netconsole configured, I decided to try from u-boot, and surprisingly u-boot was able to detect the hard drive and also read from it (even the portable hdd led lit up when it was working from u-boot) - but once the kernel tries to come up, the PogoPlug goes zombie.

As a side experiment, I tried the same Dell portable hard drive on my PC with VirtualBox running Debian Wheezy amd64 (kernel 3.2.0-4) and it detected the hard drive and UI popped up with auto-mount filemanager.

This all leads me to believe the kernel on my Wheezy (linux-image-3.3.2-kirkwood-shv_1.0_armel) misses either the driver itself for this hard drive or the hard drive driver misses the VID:PID for this device.

Do I've to make a new kernel with the driver / modified driver? Or is there simpler way to make this working?

You can try this rootfs to see if it gets any better:
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096

-bodhi
===========================
Forum Wiki
bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)

Thanks bodhi! Your latest rootfs detects and mounts the Dell hdd fine!

Now I've another Pogoplug mobile and another issue :)

The second Pogoplug mobile is identical to this one - it has the same uboot and uboot env as this one, but only one physical difference - the second one has wires soldered for serial debug port. Now the one with serial wires fails to detect the hard disk in both u-boot and linux even on your rootfs. I'm planning to remove the serial debug wires and check again (with netconsole in place, there is little use for serial debug - as I don't play around with u-boot much.)

Meanwhile, any ideas other than the serial wires, and if serial wires indeed is the problem, why? Is it something like the wires are drawing some current reducing the current available to HDD?

I don't think the serial wires would cause this type of problem. You've bought it from somebody? perhaps the USB port has problem. Does it work with a thumb drive?

-bodhi
===========================
Forum Wiki
bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)