Tag: solution

USB 3.0 Hub Stops Working on El Capitan

Has your USB 3.0 stopped working without explanation on your Mac? Here’s how to fix it.

I use a lot of external storage and it has been hard to find a USB hub that is fast, connects all my devices at once, and when using a device doesn’t drop other devices connected to it.

Anker 13-Port USB 3.0I finally found one that’s rock solid; it’s the Anker 13-Port USB 3.0 and it does everything I ever wanted.

Things were good until mid-January 2016 when the device started malfunctioning in strange ways. The first three ports did not recognize any device I put on it.  The other ports sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Reliability went out the window and I was forced to stop using it.  My guess was that something burned out. I went so far as to buy another smaller USB 3.0 hub, and well, it didn’t work either — so much so I ended up returning it.  I really wanted this hub working.

Curious, I handed the broken device to an electrical engineer and asked him if he could ascertain what was wrong with it. He took it apart, did diagnostic tests, saw nothing wrong, tried it on his computer, it worked fine, and handed it back to me fixed as just a mystery. However the story doesn’t stop there.

The Impossible Behavior

When I connected the device back up to my Mac, it behaved exactly the same way as it did before. I, of course, tried all my Mac’s USB ports.  I even tried a completely different Mac.  Identical failures.

So sure the device was working, my electrical engineer friend pulled out his Microsoft Surface Tablet, connected the hub, and instantly it worked.

We put it back on my Macs, with the same devices that just worked, it failed. Back to the Surface, it worked.  Back to the Mac, it failed.  In short, it was an electrical engineer’s WTF-nightmare.

The Common Denominator and Other Clues

At this point the problem was clearly related to the Mac.  More over, it used to work just fine, at least until mid-January.  What happened in mid-January?  El Capitan 10.11.3.

Both Macs were running El Capitan 10.11.3.

As a general rule, with Apple, the first generation hardware products have flaws, and the operating systems versions don’t usually get all the kinks out until version x.x.4 is released.  This threw immediate suspicion on the operating system, which meant it was time to check if other folks were having similar issues.

Yes they were.  (See this discussion.)

The Fix

While you’d think that one would need to go to Anker’s Driver Download page, that’s not the case.  You need to do two things:

  1. Reset the NVRAM / PRAM. (For a MacBook Pro it’s the Command-Option-P-R chord on boot.)
  2. Reset the SMC.  (For a MacBook Pro it’s the Shift-Option-Command-PowerOnButton.)

When the machine rebooted the USB hub behaved just like it used to.  Problem solved.

UPDATE (21-Mar-2016): With the introduction of El Capitan 10.11.4, it rebroke the USB 3.0 capabilities again.  The Console reports:

3/23/16 4:32:20.000 PM kernel[0]: 000227.351907 AppleUSB30Hub@14400000: AppleUSBHub::start: failed to set configuration with 0xe00002eb
3/23/16 4:32:21.000 PM kernel[0]: 000228.290970 AppleUSB30Hub@14400000: AppleUSB30Hub::start: failed to set hub depth 0 (0xe0005000)

So far, performing the above steps are not working.

OTHERS ARE HAVING IT TOO: Often the problem manifests as if the USB device, or something connected to it, is no longer working or has inadequate power, or is no longer detected by the host system.

Try your device on an older operating system (ideally the same hardware if you can), a Windows box, a Linux box, or even a Raspberry Pi — you’ll see the USB device works properly there.

YOU CAN HELP: It appears Apple may not know about the problem.

  1. Report it as a bug in OS X via the Apple Bug Reporter.
  2. Provide feedback via http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Please be kind when reporting issue, as these are the people who can help you. Give them technical details and model information to help them track it down.

UPDATE (06-May-2016): Apple has acknowledged issue 26102223 in their system and have asked for more information; I’m forwarding it to them.

UPDATE (09-Oct-2016): SOLUTION — It’s LeapMotion’s Fault!!

It seems that the Leap Motion driver may be the culprit here!

Uninstalling the driver (according to their instructions at https://support.leapmotion.com/entries/39493988-Uninstalling-the-Leap-Motion-software-on-Mac-OSX) caused the device to spring back to life without even a reboot required. Credit and thanks to David Ryskalczyk for hunting this down.

*** Between MAY and OCT, this blog suffered a large data-loss pertaining to the comments left by visitors.  I wish I had the original post by David Ryskalczyk reporting his extensive solution.  Here’s what I can manually recreate.

… I figured that maybe this was a software issue. I proceeded to clean install 10.12 on a USB drive — no issues; then 10.11 on a USB drive — *also* no issues! Seems to be software. From there I started isolating things — first with kexts, which turned out to be inconclusive, then with daemons (looking in /Library/LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents to see what was installed and running). After removing a bunch of stuff I did additional testing and confirmation to figure out exactly what was causing the problem, and sure enough, it was the Leap Motion runtime!
…
Hopefully this can be fixed so the Leap Motion drivers can successfully coexist with these USB hubs. … I suspect the real cause is that the Leap Motion runtime is tripping up a bug in the Apple drivers.
I (and others) were able to confirm that David’s fix does indeed work.
Apple, after passing on this information to them, merely marked my bug report closed as a duplicate.
This information was also passed onward to Anker, who was very grateful to have the information for answering support calls about it.
I can also confirm that after months of not having the LeapMotion driver installed, my favorite Anker 3.0 USB has been working like a champ.

Files Gone on Drobo FS with OS X Lion? Get ’em back!

Using DroboFS and OSX Lion only to discover that your Drobo shares have no content!? Yikes! But fret not, you merely have a small corruption problem brought on by the firmware, and in moments you can force a rebuild of that database and all your files will be back safe, happy, and sound with no data loss. Here’s how.

I recently updated my DroboFS to firmware 1.2.0 and dashboard 2.0.3 when I switched to Lion, and while my volume mounted there was no data in it although the Drobo lights showed there was capacity, as did the Drobo Dashboard, and the health reports indicated everything was just fine.

I spoke with Drobo Tech Support that indicated this was a known problem they are actively addressing as high priority; the problem is with Lion and their firmware, and we can expect an updated firmware release.

What’s curious about this is that if one uses the Finder and mounts the Drobo drive with SMB, using smb://Drobo-FS/, the files are there. However afp://Drobo-FS.local/ and cifs://Drobo-FS.local/ mount but reveal nothing.

A detailed description of the problem is at the article entitled: “Missing” Data (AFP) and/or CNID DB Errors. This article then leads to a second one, but is only for the brave.

Using Dropbear (SSH) with Drobo FS to regenerate the AppleDB (CNID DB) has detailed steps for regenerating the apple database.

Walt’s More Verbose Directions

  1. Using the Drobo Dashboard login to your Drobo as Administrator.
  2. Unmount all shares.
  3. Under All Devices / Settings / Admin you’ll want to check the Enable DroboApps setting, which will mount a volume entitled DroboApps on your system.
  4. Download a copy of DropBear from the Drobo Apps page.
  5. Unzip this .zip file, resulting in instructions and a compressed dropbear.tgz file . Move the dropbear.tgz file to the root of the DroboApps directory.
  6. Restart the DroboFS by going to Capacity and Tools in the Dashboard, and selecting the Tools drop down on the right side, and selecting Restart. Or, just power off the unit physically for 20 seconds and then turn it back on.
  7. When Drobo restarts, go to the Dashboard and select All Devices / Settings… / Network. Note the IP address given to the device somewhere.
  8. From OS X’s Terminal enter the command ssh root@theIPaddressAbove
  9. The default password is root, unless you’ve used Dropbear before and followed the instructions within it.
  10. Enter the command ls /mnt/DroboFS/Shares to view a list of shares on the drive.
  11. Tech Support promises the following will not cause any data loss, but anytime you’re doing reconstruction you should always have a backup (if you don’t, question your backup policy), and double check before hitting return. For each share of yours listed above, enter the command: rm -r /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/yourShareNameHere/.AppleDB and press return. Note the period indicating it’s a hidden directory.
  12. Exit Terminal by entering exit.
  13. Using the Drobo Dashboard unmount all your shares, which should be just the DroboApps share at this point; this is under the All Devices / Shares and you just uncheck all the boxes.
  14. Restart the Drobo again (see above if you’ve already forgot how).
  15. And just as important restart any Macs connected to the Drobo.
  16. When the Drobo comes up, start the Dashboard, and test the mounts. They should be working.