USB 2.0 Headaches

[brisco]

Greetings all. I'm stumped and I'm normally quite good at this.

I recently purchased a USB External HD that takes advantage of that wonderful new USB 2.0 and all it's glorious speed.

Of course my computer didn't have any USB 2.0 capabilities so I bought a USB 2.0 PCI adapter.

The adapter installs just fine, drivers load just fine and the adapter's USB ports work fine with USB 1.1 devices. As soon as I try and turn on that 2.0 HD........ KABOOM!

I get the wonderful BSOD with this message.

"Plug N' Pray has detected an error most likely caused by a faulty driver. Your system has been shutdown to prevent damage."

At first I figured the new external USB HD was foobared somehow but I had a thought and plugged into one of my orignal 1.1 USB ports. The HD works just fine that way.... slower than it should but that's normal considering it's not on a USB 2.0 port.

Other things I have tried to fix this....

Made for certain that the correct driver for this NEC PCI USB 2.0 adapter is the correct one. It is. That I have checked re-checked and checked again.

I started thinking that it might be an IRQ type conflict so I started shuffling PCI cards in my system around to see if I could fix it that way but that didn't make any change in behavior.

Here are my computer Specs

Dell Dimension 8100
1.3ghz p4
640mb of RDAM
Nvidia GeForce 2 w/ 32mb RAM (in AGP slot)
3Com NIC 10/100 (in PCI #1)
Sound Blaster Live! (in PCI #2)
NEC USB 2.0 PCI adapter (in #3,4, or 5 doesn't matter, I've even tried it in 1 and 2 and every other combination you can think of)
40 gig WD HD
Windows XP Pro fully updated with SP1 and all other updates.

So, basically it works, unless I want to plug it into the 2.0 adapter. That ain't right at all. Ideas? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

 

[FriedToast]

Bump for annoying grumpances.

 

[Robbed]

Hate to give this as the only answer, but try removing everything EXCEPT the USB 2.0 card. I think you could be partially correct about the IRQ conflict or something. Also, reboot in safe mode, and remove all of the PCI drivers before reinstalling them. Look for any ! that may indicate something is wrong in device manager while in safe mode.

If the card works without the NIC or the SB Live, you've obviously got a conflict. If it still doesn't work, take it back and get another brand USB adapter.

Good Luck!

rob

 

[TMS]

Does it work if you boot with the USB HD allready on?
I just (last week) bought external IDE->USB2 case by Mapower. There seems to be some bugs
in the usb2 detection software: WinXP doesn't always detect it correctly and fouls up the driver
loading (it uses winXP's own drivers), the next time I plug it in it works. If the hd is on when i boot then
it is detected right every time.

 

[prosaic]

And one more thing you might experiment with, in addition to some of the other suggestions already made, is to disable (not uninstall) the USB 1.1 controller(s) in Device Manager -- just to see if there's a problem with both types of USB coexisitng on this system.

- prosaic

 

[brisco]

Prosaic... tried your idea first on disabling the onboard USB 1.1 ports (since it was the easiest) That did not solve the problem, same thing was happening.

TMS, I tried turning the HD on and then booting the computer. The computer hung halfway through the bootup process. Then it got interesting. I figured that shutting it down and turning off the HD would allow me to boot back up...... WRONG! Couldn't get the computer to boot after that. I finallly pulled the USB card and THEN it booted up normally again.

Robbed, gonna try your idea tonight when I get home from work.

Thanks all for the suggestions. I'll let you know about Robbed's idea later tonight.

 

[prosaic]

Ouch! Yeah, it sounds as though somebody in that system doesn't like somebody else. Good luck with the "card game"!

- prosaic