hi,
I think I am having a hardware issue here, so probably there is not much to do but hope it doesn't get worst.. I am posting anyway in case some of you have had similar experience and/or can suggest me some diagnostic tool..so here it goes...

I am running CrunchBang! 10 (basically Debian's stable branch in a light-weighted fashion) with backported kernel...
the problems started today, shortly after boot. At the beginning the mouse and the keyboard (both hooked up to the same 4-ports-hub) were working irregularly/intermittently, then the external hard disk (directly connected to one usb port of the laptop) disappeared from the file manager (thunar).
After a bit of reboot/plug/unplug tests I have realized that 3 over 4 usb ports of the laptop are kind of gone.. I mean the mouse and/or the keyboard (low-speed USB devices according to dmesg output) work fine in those 3 "damaged" ports, but when I plug in the external hard disk or the usb-hub nothing happens and dmesg says:
If I plug in the hard disk or the hub into the 4th "healty" port everything works fine..

Moreover, I have booted into WinXp and had a similar behaviour with a pop-up complaining about poor usb performance (and nothing showing up in explorer) when the hard disk was connected to the 3 ports and, again, everything worked normally on the 4th..

any thoughts??
thanks

Here's a solution for ubuntu

If the things work on usb-1.0 I wouldn't rush to judgement on the hardware. This errorhub points at udev, and device management. Beware that those udev rules are located in odd places on each distro.

1 members found this post helpful.

thank you very much business_kid, you pointed me in a good direction!

However I still do not think the problem isn't hardware, the issue not only appeared in this particular installation of CrunchBang, but even in live cd sessions and M$-WinXp..

Anyway
seems to be a good patch for now...

my apologies to bump on this old thread, I just wanted to edit my last post, but it doesn't seem to be an option on this page.
Anyway it turned out that I am in good company with this problem...see these links
http://forum.ts.fujitsu.com/forum/vi...p?f=89&t=30298
http://www.amilo-forum.com/topic,325...t-Working.html
http://www.davesdrivers.com/forum/sh...d.php?tid=1948
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...causing-freeze
Since some of those threads are up to 5 years old, I am just glad that I had a bit more of "lifetime" compared to others.
By the way, few days after my first post here, two of the USBs started working normally again, so I just keep my finger crossed and keep using my laptop..
thanks for the help!