Compaq Presario Mandrake 10 No USB or Firewire

I have a Compaq Presario 2575us laptop and am running Mandrake 10 official (PowerPack edition). The only distro I´ve been able to install that automatically detects and enables the built in firewire and usb is SuSE. I´ve run SuSE 9 and 9.1 but prefer the Mandrake distro. I´ve been able to install Fedora Core 2 Test 3 but upon first boot it gives me a black screen, however, it does detect both devices and doesn´t lock the machine up. I haven´t been able to ¨run¨ Fedora due to the video problem. The trouble I´m having is the only way for me to install Mandrake (any version) is to hit F1 at the CD boot screen and run setup with either linux no auto or expert no auto. If I try to let the CD´s boot straight into setup it locks the machine up while trying to detect the firewire device. Now that the everything is installed, I can´t figure out how to enable the USB and Firewire ports. I´ve installed hotplug but it doesn´t seem to help. I was hoping that the 2.6 kernel with Mandrake 10 would help but it hasn´t.

Is is possible for me to use my SuSE for Fedora CD´s to install the driver needed by the USB and FIrewire so they will work under Mandrake? They worked fine under SuSE and were hotplug enabled automatically.

My biggest concern is USB, below is a c/p from the Mandrake Control Center of the two USB controllers used by the system (3 ports total)

Vendor: ‎VIA Technologies
Bus: ‎PCI
Bus identification: ‎1106:3038:103c:850
Location on the bus: ‎0:b:0 (second port is b:1)
Description: ‎VT82C586B USB
Module: ‎usb-uhci
Media class: ‎SERIAL_USB

Vendor: ‎VIA Technologies Inc
Bus: ‎PCI
Bus identification: ‎1106:3104:103c:850
Location on the bus: ‎0:b:2
Description: ‎VT8235 USB Enhanced Controller
Module: ‎ehci-hcd
Media class: ‎SERIAL_USB

In case anyone has dealt with this before, this is the Firewire info also

Vendor: ‎Texas Instruments
Bus: ‎PCI
Bus identification: ‎104c:8026:103c:850
Location on the bus: ‎0:c:0
Description: ‎TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394 Controller (PHY/Link) 1394a-2000
Module: ‎ohci1394
Media class: ‎SERIAL_FIREWIRE

Any help would be appreciated. I´m a member of the Mandrake Club but have had no luck there. This isn´t a critical machine so I´m willing to experiment on it to get the ports to work.

Thanks,
BIACS

In case anyone else out there has a similar laptop. I was finally able to get all 3 USB and the Firewire port working after installing Mandrake with expert no auto.

I started a new session and logged in as root (it just did not work for me the first time using su to root in a terminal window), opened a terminal window and entered

modprobe hid <enter>

modprobe usbcore <enter>

modprobe ohci1394 <enter>

modprobe ohci-hcd <enter>

modprobe uhci-hcd <enter>

modprobe ehci-hcd <enter>

On subsequent reboots I do have to open a terminal window while logged in with my account, su to root and enter the commands again but then it works great. Fstab still won't allow me to access one of my external USB drives that is NTFS formatted, I know it should only allow read but I'm not even getting that. Fstab keeps mounting that drive as fat with 777 permissions.