wrote:
On Friday, January 3, 2020 at 9:14:12 AM UTC+1, Paul wrote:
wrote:
Sigh,

As far as I know nobody made a video about how usb 2.0/3.0 external harddisks and usb sticks can't work on usb 1.0.

The manufacturers kinda implicitely/indirectly mention this but not mentioning usb 1.0 backwards compatibility.

So basically this means the USB STANDARD IS BROKEN and therefore it sucks ballz.

This video shows the mentioning on the packages and websites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_2xH--E_o0

It also explores wikipedia, there is very little information about WHY it's not backward compatible.

What is even worse about this is:

The usb 2.0 and usb 3.0 plugs will fit in a usb 1.0 port. Making people believe that maybe it will work on computers and windows xp.

I tried this yesterday and windows xp did detect the drive a little bit, but for some reason couldn't read or write or make it show up in windows explorer.

So now I am not sure what is going on.

Is it a windows xp limitation ? Is it a driver issue ? Like many peope might believe, they will start messing around, but what if it can never work ?!?!?!

It wastes their time... and therefore manufacturers and the usb "comitee" that made this standard should be somewhat ashamed of themselfes !

This problem can still be corrected by being HONEST about it and TELLING people STRAIGHT to their FACES why it won't work.

Perhaps these ****ers don't even know WHY it won't work ?! WHAT THE **** MAN ?!.

So let this be a HEADS up in case you think you can use these devices on old computers.

Only if they are not that old and have usb 2.0.... but usb 1.0 computers ?!?!?!?

Not according to them ?! good luck figuring out which usb ports your computer supports ?!

If somebody still knows a hack how to get this working on usb 1.0 ports I still be interested ! =D

Maybe they just disabled it because it might be slow, big mistake...

Slow drives can still be usefull for getting data off of old machines.

Beats unsafe internet connections !

Now you know, somewhat, and knowing somewhat, is HALF the battle G.I. JOEEE ! =D

Bye,
Skybuck.
I got this working by the way.

P4 1.8GHz 845 Northbridge ICH2 Southbridge
2 USB 1.1 ports
512MB RAM

I booted it with BionicPup 32-bit.

http://puppylinux.com/index.html#download

http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux...2-8.0-uefi.iso

I plugged in the USB3 Sandisk Flash, and the
file systems on it mounted.

If I'd used Win98, then without some help, it
wouldn't have worked. I'd need the
Maximus Decim NUSB drivers for USB Mass Storage
class to work. And Maximus doesn't work with
all chipsets either.

You just need the right OS to encourage it to work.
Or have the driver disc from way back when. One
or the other.

The USB3 stick has USB3 pins and USB2 pins.
The USB2 pins contact the USB1.1 jack and
the USB2 pins are the ones that are backward
compatible with USB1.1.

Eventually there will be USB versions that
don't work with USB1.1. I don't own anything
(yet) that doesn't work.

Paul

OK Paul, thanks for trying this out !

I have never heard of puppy linux so this is new ?!

Puppy has been around for a while.

It's a set of distros for low-end machines, and old machines.
It typically uses a 2.6.x kernel or so, and the drivers
are centered around old hardware.

If you run Puppy on a really new machine, there's a good chance
it can't probe any of the hardware, as it isn't set up for that.

The BionicPup uses around 70MB of RAM to draw the desktop,
but the LiveCD also copies the entire CD into RAM (260MB).
And, it uses RAM for the home directory. On my 512MB machine,
I was getting close to being out of memory, because of the
files it was storing.

But if you set up the persistence/Save stuff it wants, it's
less likely to run out of resources on you.

I only used that, so I'd have something to run a USB port with.
Because Win98 out of the box, doesn't do a lot of USB.


I have two questions for you:

How the hell are file systems/sectors/clusters transferred over USB ?!
I am still mystified even after reading usb 3.1 specification.

The size of the quanta USB uses for some things, is very small.

I don't really know what the packet size is for sectors of storage devices.
Whether it chooses to send whole sectors, or chops the sectors up into
multiple packets.

USB2 was polled and centered around a time constant of 125us. This
is a "telecom number". 8KHz was a part of speech processing, and
TDM (time division multiplexing). USB2 uses "slots" for constant bitrate
services. And for things that expect "regular delivery" of stuff.

USB3, I don't think it's tied down like that. For one thing, it isn't
polled any more. It's more like it is Interrupt based. It's probably
more like SATA or PCI Express, than it is like USB2.


Maybe it's scsi protocol on top of it, or something microsoft specific ?
You know anything about that ?!

SCSI CDBs (Control and Data Blocks) is the Microsoft method for
anything "foreign".

If there isn't a "native" stack for something, you
instead set your stuff up so it attaches to the SCSI thing instead.

And typical drivers, a few years back, the driver would "install twice".
There were two items in the stack, and one item (typically a "null" item),
interfaces to the SCSI part and received the CDBs. And the other driver
chunk, interfaced to the registers on the foreign hardware. It's
something like that. It's been years since I've had to look at that.


Second question:

How the hell do I mount a VHD in Linux ?! =D

I know Linux does things differently with scripts and automation and downloading software but I kinda like VHD/containers-like-approach for my own data and portability.

I don't get why Linux doesn't seem to support virtual harddisks out of the box, feels very weird and alien to me.

Bye,
Skybuck =D

There is a "not very ripe" solution mentioned here.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-file-in-linux

VHDs come in: Dynamic
Fixed
Differencing Disks

Dynamic means, if a sector contains only 0x00 bytes, no storage space
is used to hold them. This makes dynamic disks "small", when not a
lot of user data is on the disk. It's a "preferred" format in a sense,
because you don't need a lot of space to hold them.

But the problem is, you can't use any Linux tools directly on a
dynamic disk, because "it's full of holes".

Now, if you use a converter, and convert Dynamic to Fixed, the
file becomes "full sized". A 127GB disk image now takes... 127GB
of storage space. No matter whether it's got one file or
ten thousand files in it. "Fixed" VHDs are not very efficient.

But, on the positive side, every sector that exists on a physical
disk, would be represented on a Fixed virtual disk.

You can use "-o loop" and do a loopback mount on /dev/sda1
inside the Fixed VHD if you want. All that you need is
the offset. The file system header (the first sector), has
the size information, so the file system mounter knows what
to do. You must specify the offset value. With a hex editor,
you step out to that offset value, and verify that "NTFS"
or whatever string the file system uses, is present, as proof
you're pointed at the correct sector.

----- like a real disk ----
+------------+-----+-----------------------+
| VHD header | MBR | /dev/sda1 | Fixed VHD is "flat" and ready to go
+------------+-----+-----------------------+
^
+----- Need this address, to do "-o loop" mount
"NTFS" string should be in this sector, for example

But it isn't exactly convenient to "expand" a disk like that.
If the disk was large, you could spend half the day doing
something like this. Whereas the StackOverflow method is a
more intelligent method - even if the software isn't finished.

*******

You can see the release number listed here, is 1.40. Softwares
get numbers greater than 0.99, when they're "release quality",
so maybe the current version works better or something. Anything
is possible with free software. And you exist in the ecosystem,
to test this stuff and raise bug reports :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libguestfs

Paul