the card was working under all default options before, but now it wont detect hardware. the card and ports are still listed under the command 'lspci', but it no longer detects devices when they are plugged in. ive tried recompiling the kernel a few times with different options, but to no avail. is there some option i should be looking for?

the card is a five port NEC (didnt even have a brand label) and its hooked into a single board system with a 3.2ghz dual core and 2gb ram

I would start by comparing (use DIFF or something if you like) the config file for the old kernel against the config file for the new kernel. Look at any/all USB-specific areas for differences.

If this leads nowhere, we may need more info.

Sasha

PS - something I usually do when upgrading the kernel is copy my old kernels config file into the new nernel source area and load it into xconfig, and start the configuration process using that as a default.

PPS - Please tell us what distro you are using, or more better would be to put it in your profile.

PPPS - I had some weird issues with 2.6.18 as I recall.. Why not move to a much newer kernel?

actually, i now think it might have been caused by the fact that 'make oldconfig' wasnt porting the settings over correctly.. now that the new settings are made it might work...

...if it werent for the fact that now its giving me an error saying
VFS: Cannot open root device "811" or unknown-block(8,17)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,17)

just a side-note, this is set up on a raid 1 configuration through a megaraid card... but it shouldnt cause any issues because all the options relating to it are set, even though the kernel ran on the defaults (without support for the usb pci card)

any reason this would happen after putting the kernel settings in? and why it still comes up after reverting to default settings? ...ive tried a bunch of the fixes on here with no luck

PS - yeah, for some reason 'make oldconfig' didnt work so i used 'make xconfig' and saved the old settings to a config file, and loaded them to the new kernel

PPS - slackware 11

PPPS - customer request x_x;