Comment 10 for bug 586435

I'm on Ubuntu 10.04.4, and kernel 2.6.32-40-generic-pae. I use an external USB DVD writer for nightly incremental backups, and when that overflows I use an external USB drive to do a full backup onto. That happens about every month or two.
This time, for the first time ever, I could not mount the USB drive: dmesg was showing:

new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd
unable to enumerate USB device
device descriptor read/all, error -71

I tried 3 different external USB drives (not pen drives, disc drives), with the same result; although I could mount pen drives on the (1m extension) cable plugged into that USB port, which I have been using for years. So I thought that meant the cable was okay.

From some googling, I wondered if it could be a cable problem. So I tried plugging the USB disc drive into a front USB port via different USB cables, and found one cable worked and three that didn't. I also read various reports from recent years that they could get their drives (and other devices) working reliably if they either forced an uload of the ehci_hcd module, or, in later kernels where that's built in, turned it off.

Do you think that the problem could be that some cables just can't handle the speed of USB 2 reliably, and the driver doesn't fall back gracefully to run at USB 1 speeds in those cases, thus causing an error which becomes visible and troublesome for most ordinary users?