Public bug reported:
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
Release: 12.04
Kernel: 3.2.0-32-generic-pae
(Distribution: Lubuntu)
Package: libmtp9 - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) library
Version: 1.1.3-1ubuntu0.1
Hardware: Desktop PC, rather new
Hi folks,
I just want to tell you how I spend the last two days:
I have Lubuntu 12.04 installed and it works fine for a while despite a warning
message on every boot. I don't remember the whole msg exactly, but it looked
like this:
"mtp-probe: checking bus X, device XX:
"/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000...usbX/X-X - No such file or directory"
The X represents some digits respectively. While booting with an USB
stick attached the msg showed up two times, without USB stick just one
time.
What expected to happen:
No error msg at boot time, full access to USB sticks without problems
What happened:
Two days ago I tried to copy a (relatively) large amount of data at once onto
an 4GB USB stick with a FAT32 filesystem (which is no mtp device, obviously).
After 165 MB had been copied the system did not responds anymore. There were
more than 3GB of free space left, so I was wondering, what happened. It wasn't
freezed, because Conky still worked. But no reaction on mouse/keyboard input. I
tried to change to tty1, tty2 and so on - no success. The LED of the stick
flickered like crazy - nothing else. I was not be abel to do any thing, except
for having a beer...
I was waiting until the beer was finished, then I decided to hard
resetting the machine. While rebooting the computer stopped at the BIOS
boot screen (the USB stick was still in place and doesn't stop to
flicker). So I removed the stick and did a reset again. The computer
starts normally, the warning msg still comes up. Then I plugged in the
USB stick, it was reckognized and the system asked if it should open
the drive with the file manager. I pressed okay - the system denied
cooporation immediately. I tried it several times with always the same
result - a non-respondig system. Sometimes it freezed (Conky clock stood
still, CPU graphs even), sometimes just no response.
What gaves me a hint:
I tried a lot of things to access the stick. Then I startet the system with
root console only and attached the stick. But first I had to edit
/etc/default/grub and invoke update-grub to be able to access the console by
avoiding to enter the graphic environment first (see post scriptum). This gaves
me the first clue what happened: when I plugged in the USB stick mtp-probe
tried to access the device and stopped with no success, but didn't exit.
Pressing CTRL-C terminates the programm and the system works. I guess, the same
thing happened before behind the scenes, but pressing CTRL-C won't affect a
program that runs in the background of a graphic environment.
I still believed my usb stick was damaged, so I run Photorec_static to
save my data. This program had no problems to access the whole drive. So
I further searched the net and found a lot of bug reports in 2011
complaining about similiar issues and eventually I had been pointed to
libmtp9.
Solution
I deinstalled libmtp9 and that solved all of the problems - almost. Without
libmtp9 I was be able to mount the USB stick and access all of the data with no
problems. The warning message at boot time doesn't shows up anymore.
Two files were left that I couldn't delete from the stick. A message told me,
the filesystem would be read only. That are the files where the copy process
stopped. Well, that is another pair of shoes, but since I was be able to read
all the data (and delete all other files) I copied the content of the stick to
the harddrive and invoked mkfs.vfat to build a new partition.
Now the stick works fine again, the warning message at boot time is gone and
I'm lucky that nothing worse happened.
Conclusion
I don't know if libmtp9 is necessary or even essential to access certain
devices. But I know what it does to me and from now on I will consider this
whole program as a bug, since this issue is not new and a year ago they said it
has been fixed. It isn't, obviously.
Fortunately its encapsulated into a package and I hope I will always
remember to remove it ( as well as the packages belonging to libmtp9:
libmtp-runtime, libmtp-common) from my system before I'm going to work
with it seriously.
Best regards,
Tom
PS:
Furthermore, this story tells me, that it isn't a good idea to set
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
which is the standard setting in (L)Ubuntu, since this makes it hard to
maintain the system in case of an issue like described above. At least
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT should have a value of 5 to be able to access the GRUB boot
menu by pressing SHIFT, e.g. to access the root console without entering the
graphic environment at first.
However, I commented out both lines and set "noplymouth" as kernel boot
parameter in order to see, what happens at boot time. That seems to be at least
recommendable.
** Affects: libmtp (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: libmtp9 mtp-probe
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1072351
Title:
USB stick attached and libmtp9 causes the whole system to deny
cooperation
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