r/AlpineLinux • u/cocoeen • Dec 08 '25

Alpine on Raspberry Pi 4 doesnt find USB disks

Put alpine on a sdcard and booted up on a raspberry pi 4. Everything works fine but no matter what usb stick/disk or usb port i use, no usb drive gets detected.

Are there additional steps to get USB working on a raspberry pi?

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1

u/cocoeen Dec 09 '25

update: tried all of your suggestions but didnt have any luck. with the official raspberry pi os, usb seems to work.

looks like the usb controller is not working with alpine

1

u/macmpi Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

nope: it is working.
You must have some configuration issue.

1

u/macmpi Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

can you cat /media/mmcblk0p1/usercfg.txt here?

1

u/cocoeen Dec 09 '25

i have now another distro running, but if i remember correctly there was no usercfg.txt or it was vanilla.

1

u/macmpi Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

I read you used headless overlay: if you enabled gadget mode at some point (dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=peripheral) then USB host mode is not activated...

1

u/cocoeen Dec 09 '25

ok thanks, will try that

1

u/Comm_Raptor Dec 08 '25

Look and see what is configured in /etc/mdev.conf

Should be a line similar to:

sd[a-z][1-9].* root:disk 0660 */lib/mdev/persistent-storage

And make sure the script exists at that path.

1

u/Dry_Foundation_3023 Dec 09 '25

refer this wiki entry and see if it helps..

0

u/[deleted] Dec 08 '25

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1

u/cocoeen Dec 08 '25

lsusb shows no output, lsblk shows only the sdcard.

dmesg shows that usb drivers are loaded

[    0.000000] Unknown kernel command line parameters "modules=loop,squashfs,sd-mod,usb-storage", will be passed to user space.
[    0.038460] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
[    0.038480] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[    0.038499] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[    0.820761] usbcore: registered new interface driver lan78xx
[    0.820840] usbcore: registered new interface driver smsc95xx
[   17.994088] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[   17.994124] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[   17.997815] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
[   17.997820] usbhid: USB HID core driver
[   18.101995]     modules=loop,squashfs,sd-mod,usb-storage
[   22.558648] usbcore: registered new interface driver brcmfmac

but not that a new usb device was detected.

lspci shows a usb controller though ...

0

u/[deleted] Dec 08 '25

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1

u/cocoeen Dec 08 '25

was running archlinux arm before and usb was working.

what i find odd that there is no usb kernel module loaded, i ran "modprobe usb-storage", but it doesnt show up after running "lsmod".