HD-Fox with USB hub gadget => USB drive not candidate for r-a-g

[/df]

I just acquired a top-quality Chinese USB hub with 3 USB sockets and some memory card slots, just the thing to add to an HD-Fox T2 setup.

Using this to host a USB stick (sometimes referred to here as a USB pen drive) with CF packages installed together with a WLAN dongle results in ignoral of the stick which has appeared as sdb1.

In this particular configuration that means that the WLAN connection doesn't come up automatically, and other magic like tunefix-update doesn't work (and wouldn't even with a wired connection).

Apparently the init script S60mdev causes /etc/mdev/run-and-gun to be called with MDEV=/dev/sdb1 and ACTION=add, which would kick off the initialisation of /mod on the drive, except that it only looks for /dev/sda1.

As a work-around I created a 00run-and-gun specialised to this case in /mod/boot/xinit.d, which cracked the problem. However this is rather unwieldy for what ought to be a "configuration file".

It might be undesirable for the CF to initialise every /mod found on mounted disks, but the test in /etc/mdev/run-and-gun for the HD seems too restrictive.

The HDR case looks for any second partition ~ /sd.2/.

Wouldn't it be reasonable for the HD case to do something similar but ~/sd.1/ ?

 

[af123]

Wouldn't it be reasonable for the HD case to do something similar but ~/sd.1/ ?

Yes, it would, but you appear to be the first person to connect multiple disks to the HD model.
Your workaround is exactly what I would have suggested, pending another custom firmware release.

 

[Black Hole]

Years ago we talked about using a powered hub to support multiple external drives on an HD-FOX, and I assumed people used them OK. Maybe that was just for one drive and a dongle.

 

[/df]

The Chinese hub gadget introduces a new feature, two sets of drives. The card slots get sda, the USB sockets sdb. I didn't try the other obvious work-around, namely putting the CF on a memory card, because it wasn't obvious which type of card would be sda1.

With several attached drives (generic hub or otherwise), possibly more than one might be ext2/3-formatted with a /mod directory.

If there is a way to ensure that the wanted CF drive (HD) will be #1, all's well. I'm not clear if the drive numbers are tied to particular slots, or could change eg according to order of discovery. On laptops I believe I've always seen the former behaviour.