[PROBLEM] Installed 6.x - USB media not working (ARM6)

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Wigwam

I'm having trouble telling the players apart without a score card (that's a baseball reference for those you not fans).

You seem to be using two different RPis with two different USB thumbdrives and other differences but your posts don't consistently differentiate between them.

Here's what I think I see in your last posts.

1. an RPi Zero (not Zero W) with an attached Alcor-made USB 2.0 Hub to which is attached a SanDisk Ultra 3.0 thumb drive and a Ralink-made USB/WiFi adapter. I don't recall you ever mentioning use of a hub. The dmesg output includes a remark that the USB 3.0 thumbdrive isn't running at full speed (surprise! it's on a 2.0 hub), but that's ok because 3.0 drives are backward compatible with 2.0 hubs. In the end we get "sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk".
   Are you saying this configuration doesn't work? Where's the error messages that demonstrate that? 
   
2. an RPi Model B (with your truncated dmesg output I have to take your word for it) to which, apparently, is attached a SanDisk Cruzer U thumb drive which aiso gets "sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk" but then has a problem "print_req_error: I/O error, dev sda, sector 304". This is followed by the repetitive attempts to deal with it, failing on different sectors.
   Have you tried this thumb drive in another Linux or OS X computer to make sure it isn't corrupted? Also, since the truncated dmesg output doesn't say, what else is attached to this RPi?
   

As an aside, folks have often found USB hubs to be a source of trouble, especially if they are un-powered and/or at the end of long USB cables. Having good power to the RPi is always a necessity.

I no longer possess any first-generation RPis but I do have several RPi0Ws which have given me no problem with directly connected USB thumb drives.

Regards,
Kent