MiSTer FPGA Forum

I've got a 2.1 usb hub that has served me well for a couple years (I think from https://misterfpga.co.uk) but yesterday it stopped reading usb drives.

Controllers work fine. USB drives no longer cause the corresponding usb light to light up and don't seem to be attempted to mount at all.

My main drive is a 4tb unpowered drive which unsurprisingly can take a while to spin up, but always works eventually. It works fine in WIndows, where I did an error check and found no problems. To test a different drive I slapped a games folder on a random thumbdrive, which doesn't get mounted or cause the usb to light up either. I also did a fresh install and tried reseating the usb hub, no dice

Does anyone have any ideas, or something I can do with power supply maybe before I buy a new usb hub? I don't really know anything about power.

Is the hub powered? If so it may be that the power supply fails (but it sounds not very likely to me).

Chris23235 wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 5:21 am Is the hub powered? If so it may be that the power supply fails (but it sounds not very likely to me).

It's the 2.1 hub, so it's powered and a y-cable comes off the power supply and goes into the de10 nano and the usb hub separately.

I find that recently unpowered devices such a hard drives don't work reliably. I've since bought a powered USB hub and everything works perfectly. I can only assume that over the years Linux upgrades and other new features have increased the power draw and there just isn't enough left on the USB port to power some devices. I'd suggest either going to powered hub route or seeking out a known low power requirement drive.

dave18 wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 7:02 am I find that recently unpowered devices such a hard drives don't work reliably. I've since bought a powered USB hub and everything works perfectly. I can only assume that over the years Linux upgrades and other new features have increased the power draw and there just isn't enough left on the USB port to power some devices. I'd suggest either going to powered hub route or seeking out a known low power requirement drive.

It is powered, though? It's the standard mister usb hub 2.1.

riblad_om wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 7:10 am

dave18 wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 7:02 am I find that recently unpowered devices such a hard drives don't work reliably. I've since bought a powered USB hub and everything works perfectly. I can only assume that over the years Linux upgrades and other new features have increased the power draw and there just isn't enough left on the USB port to power some devices. I'd suggest either going to powered hub route or seeking out a known low power requirement drive.

It is powered, though? It's the standard mister usb hub 2.1.

Maybe try it with another AC adapter, but that's only a vague guess.

Sorry, missed the point that it was a powered hub. Are you still using the stock power supply? I think a better one such as a 4amp meanwell supply is recommended these days.

Same issue here, over time the mister usb hub has been less consistent. I do have a Meanwell 4A PSU. Not only external HDDs can't be powered through the USB hub as before, but I can't get all 6 ports to work with controllers, keyboard and mouse, I need to unplug 1-2 in order to get some other working.

I have 10A PSU and nevertheless mister USB hub is inconsistent as well with external (and powered) USB attached...

A few months ago I got a 4A power supply.

I'm used to inconsistency but my hub now doesn't even attempt to mount usb drives 100% of the time, which makes me think I probably need a new one, or a new de-10 if the micro usb port on that has gotten damaged somehow.

I just got a "WD_BLACK 2TB P10 Game Drive" and the light on the drive comes on, but does not blink like it should if it's getting accessed by the MiSTer FPGA, and the MiSTer FPGA does not seem to see any ROMs placed on the drive, I tried placing ROMs in:

GAMES/CORE/ROMS

and

CORE/ROMS

the drive is formatted with NTFS, I am using a 5A power supply for the MiSTer FPGA, I am using the "MiSTer FPGA 7 Port USB HUB V2.1", I tried uppercase, lower case, and exact directory names, and making sure that I removed the CORES from the SD card that I plan on using with my external hard drive, and have tried all 7 USB ports with no luck, so next I went to the Linux command line:

"sudo fdisk -l"
only shows the SD card

"lsusb"
shows "ID 1058:2630 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Game Drive"

So the MiSTer FPGA can see the drive but does not mount it, so then I have a look at:

"dmesg"

I try "dmesg" before and after plugging in the hard drive, this shows that the hard drive is correctly identified, and that the MiSTer FPGA sees the hard drive has a "USB Mass Storage Device", but stops at "[sda] Spinning up disk...", so then I got thinking about it, and I believe it's likely a power problem, so I decided to try plugging a powered hub into the MiSTer FPGA USB hub and then plugging the "WD_BLACK 2TB P10 Game Drive" into the powered hub, and it works, the only problem now is that the powered USB hub keeps the hard drive on all the time, even with the MiSTer FPGA turned off.

*EDIT*

I wanted to add, that the directory structure that worked for my external NTFS formatted hard drive was:

CORE/ROMS

and that the CORE, ROMS, and ROMS directories, don't seem to need any changes for them to work, you could have:

MegaCD/Sonic CD

or

PSX/Croc 2

and they should work just fine, however I would have the CORE names the same has what was on the SD card, and that you likely need a BIOS inside the CORE directory.

riblad_om wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 5:28 am

Chris23235 wrote: ↑Tue May 03, 2022 5:21 am Is the hub powered? If so it may be that the power supply fails (but it sounds not very likely to me).

It's the 2.1 hub, so it's powered and a y-cable comes off the power supply and goes into the de10 nano and the usb hub separately.

I’d look into a different y splitter cable. Sometimes those can drop voltage. Maybe yours has degraded somewhat and is not delivering enough power anymore.

I have a splitter from d0p3fish, but unfortunately he is oos at the moment (https://ko-fi.com/s/3b85640bab). I’m sure you could grab a new splitter from Misteraddons or another MiSTer reseller.

If anyone's curious I ended up buying a new usb hub and now everything works. It also may have been the usb bridge connection to the usb hub, or that the stadoffs I was using were a bit too long, but things are working now so I'm not interested in touching anything to narrow it down.

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_M ... the-mister - also anyone experiencing low-level failures like this should always try to overwrite their linux folder with the latest linux folder from the sd-installer image like in this link.