I have been to hell and back trying to get this USB Compact Flash card reader to work on my computer. It is like a "dongle" but you get a male-female USB lead with it, and so I plugged it in, and everything was fine. I even posted something about how I got it installed.

Then things went a bit pear-shaped and I had to reinstall my last backup, taken just before the CF Reader was loaded. Now everytime I plugged it in, the system froze, and I had to reboot the computer.

If I left the CF card in when I rebooted, the computer froze at "Checking Module Dependencies". It only happened with my full Mandrake install, if I was using a rescue disk, or even the Mandrake installation program, or booting into Windows, everything was fine.

My mobo has 2 USB headers one of which goes to an expansion slot at the bottom and back of the case, one of which goes to a pair of USB sockets on the front of my case. It also has two USB sockets on board, which appear on the back of the case near the top. I use the two low ones for my printer and scanner.

I tried the top two at the back for the CF card. Froze. Reboot. I tried the front, froze, reboot.

Then last night I tried the lower one at the front. Works. Mounts. Perfect. Tried the higher of the two. Froze. Consistent every time. They are plugged into the same header, for Christs sake!!!!!

So I spent the best part of a week wondering what the hell I had done differently, was some daemon at work?

Obviously I have the solution: use the socket that works! But they both work in Windows so can someone explain to me precisely what is going on?

BTW the mobo is an Asus A7N266VM. I am using Mandrake 9.1 and the CF Reader us a Kouwami which comes up as a SiiG!

DAVE

If anything, its the driver for the USB hub. Maybe it has a problem with the second port... who knows, it might be an issue with usb mass storage driver, if you wanted to compile in verbose debugging into the usb-storage module AND whichever main host module you're using: uhci, ohci, ehci... etc... then it might log something useful during the freeze that you could forward on to the driver maintainer that would help them code that out. Honestly, I recommend doing this, but that's a bit of a commitment.

Cheers,

Finegan

I've had a funny reaction in the past to a USB mouse, and I am now wondering if it worked when I plugged it into the lower front socket, I know it never worked in the back, eventually I used a PS/2 adaptor.

I have seen another posting today involving a USB mouse, a freeze and an Asus/nVidia-based mobo.

I think the mobo is seriously flawed. The USB ports may work OK in Windoze, but honestly I know we mock Windows for its crashes but I have never had a mobo that crashed like this one.

I am seriously thinking of reverting to my old PC Chips 810LMR. It might be slow but one thing is undeniable: it works and works well.

BTW it is ohci.

Before I decide whether I want to compile anything into anything can you tell me exactly what it entails?

DAVE

Recompiling your kernel?

Er... installing the kernel source, reading through the pretty good doc over at the Linux Documentation Project, then in the menu of what to add and what to leave out, by default Mandrake will have left out the USB top-level option of verbose debugging, and lower down, verbose debugging of mass-storage. Add those in, and a ton of info will end up in "dmesg", which is also usually in /var/log/messages

Cheers,

Finegan

davecs,

Do you have 'noapic' in the 'append =' line in lilo.conf? This appears to clear up a few hardware problems with Mandrake 9.1. Try these links for more info on what it is and how it helps:

http://www.mandrakeforum.com/print.php?sid=2459

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/56073

http://linuxquestions.org/questions/history/52327

The easiest way to check if this is your problem is to try:

dmesg | grep irq
dmesg | grep usb

If any of the IRQs listed in either output are above 16, you have found your problem.

My installation of Mandrake 9.1 went fine, but it hung at the first re-boot after installation, at the line 'Checking module dependencies'. This was fixed by putting 'noapic' into the 'append =' line in lilo.conf. After that, it worked like a charm.

Right: These are my outputs:

root://home/dave: # dmesg | grep irq
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
NFORCE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
parport0: irq 7 detected

root://home/dave: # dmesg | grep usb
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xe09f3000, IRQ 10
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:02.0, PCI device 10de:01c2 (nVidia Corporation)
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xe09f5000, IRQ 10
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:03.0, PCI device 10de:01c2 (nVidia Corporation)
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
usbdevfs: remount parameter error
usb.c: registered new driver usblp
printer.c: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 2 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x03F0 pid 0x1904
usb.c: USB device 3 (vend/prod 0x1606/0x130) is not claimed by any active driver.
usb.c: registered new driver usbscanner
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage

No irqs above 16. So I guess "noapic" would not work?

DAVE

I just read one of the posts linked to above and installed usbview. It showed that in fact three of my usb sockets are on one port and three on another. The header for the two front sockets uses two different ports. So the port I have everything plugged in (Printer/Scanner/CF Reader) works. Presumably the other one is faulty?

Maybe I'm thick, but I ran the LILO configurator in KDE Control Centre, went into expert mode, and added noapic to all the lines beginning with:

append="

So my main entry reads:

append="quiet noapic devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off"

Is that right? I rebooted after doing this but the computer still froze when I plugged the compact flash reader into the wrong socket!

DAVE

Yes, that's how you would configure for turning off APIC, so I would presume something else is the cause. Perhaps your assessment of a faulty USB port is looking likely. Just as some find the NForce chip produces problems with video, maybe it there are issues with how it handles USB as well.

Geoff, I noticed in one of the links in your earlier post you can add "pci=BIOS". Is this to the append line?

There is no means in my BIOS of switching off Plug and Pray (that's what I call it, anyway). Maybe that would make my other USB ports available?

DAVE

Dave, you're right: the 'pci-BIOS' goes into the 'append =' line, and it turns off plug n pray. Since you can't do this in the BIOS, and haven't up till now, there is a very good chance that this is the cause of your hardware problems. Linux relies on the BIOS to perform device detection for it, and with plug n pray set to On, this tells the BIOS to leave device detection to the OS. This is fine for Windows, but no good for Linux. Insert the 'pci-BIOS' (not sure if it should be 'pci-bios' & I don't have time to check now, so watch capitalisation) and you should see some improvement (I've got my fingers crossed for you).

Geoff.

I've tried pci-BIOS and pci-bios and neither makes any difference. The noapic inclusion changes the point at which starting up the machine with the CF card plugged in freezes the system. Without it, it freezes at Finding Module Dependencies, with it it freezes at Checking Filesystem. Once up and running it just freezes either way, though with noapic it seems more serious in that files seem to get damaged, whereas without noapic, I can generally reboot. Thankfully I have my Partition Image floppies and some spare space on my Windows partition to save an image or three. I've had to do a few restores, I can tell you!

DAVE