Mandrake 10 + nforce2 -> USB ports not working!
 

Hi all;

Hope you can help me. I'm quite a newbie to linux, but it's getting frustrating as I'm actually a Windows 2000 Admin... "Old dog, new tricks comes to mind.."

Anyway, I've installed Mandrake 10 (community ed) on my home PC as I was getting fed up of constant updates and security warnings at home, and at work. All went well with the install, but I then found my machine kept freezing. With a bit of surfing around, and the help of this great forum I found I had to modify the lilo.conf, adding "nolapic and apic=off" or simular.

Anyway, I did this, and the crashing stopped and my PC has been up for 3 days straight now without any problems. However, after I added these lines to the lilo.conf and running it + rebooting (or this may of been fluke) my USB has packed in and I can't get any devices working. On boot it scrolls USB controller is OK and USB printer OK etc, but it seems no power is being fed to the USB ports as both my USB mouse and USB webcam have LEDs which light on boot normally.
I've tried unplugging, plugging - everything, but with no luck.

Any ideas?

My system is a nforce2 Ultra system and I have no other problems apart from this - and all these devices WERE working before I starting changing the lilo.conf - changing it back doesn't seem to fix it, or strangly start the freezes again (maybe due to an update I installed after getting the system stable).

Another thing which might help, when I check out the hotplug service it's off - when I try and start it the GUI freezes. It looks like my USB controller is working alright, just strangly the ports seem disabled.

If anyone has any ideas, I'll try anything... it's got to the point where I need my printer running so might have to do the honourable Windows solution and re-install Mandrake Official in the hope it works.

Thanks.

Richard