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USB degrading

Started by Criguada, 2007.11.13, 00:06:37

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Criguada

Hi all,
I need help about something very strange that is happening to my eCS 1.2R.
I have always had no problems accessing my USB thumbdrives, of which I have 4, ranging from 64Mb to 2Gb, and of different makes and ages. Well, "always" may be a little exaggerated... let's say that since the installation of the latest generation of IBM drivers all problems have disappeared.

Now (since about a month or two) I am experiencing growing difficulties in accessing my thumbdrives. Sometimes I insert one in the USB socket and its led will not even light up... eCS senses absolutely nothing. Sometimes, upon inserting, the system apparently locks up, but as soon as I take it out the system frees itself (I see a spike in the CPU meter). Sometimes it works as expected.

Initially I thought about HW problems, but Linux and eCS 2.x on the same box work flawlessly.
Then I (thought I) noticed a correlation with Pianopad. But in the end it was a false alarm.
Now, since about two weeks, I cannot mount my thumbdrives at all: not one of them will work, no matter which USB socket I try.
I have tried to reformat one of them and reinstate LVM information with DFSee (something that helped in one occasion in the past), but it made no difference.
I have tried removing ACPI (the only thing that really changed recently in my box), no difference.

Meanwhile, eCS 2.0 RC2 works flawlessly.

Has anybody else ever seen something like this? Suggestions? I have already tried everything I can think of... :-(  Help!

Thankyou
Bye
Cris

Pete

Hi Cris

Sounds similar to a USB drive non-access problem my system developed after installing ACPI v2.22

The solution here is the use of the /CD (Crazy Device) switch with the acpi driver - my system mainboard is nVidia nForce4 based so if using nF4, or later, chipset give it a try.

Regards

Pete

Criguada

Hi Pete,
this is great information, thanks!!!!!

I too was under the impression that ACPI was responsible, because the degradation was apparently directly related wiith the advancing of ACPI release numbers applied to the system.
However my suspicions were all of a sudden proved wrong when I completely removed ACPI from the config.sys and tried using my USB keys without success.

Nevertheless I will try your suggestion (I have an nVidia-based mainboard too) hoping in a miracle :-D
*Maybe* the ACPI drivers left the hardware in a state that was not undone by simply removing the drivers from config.sys... who knows?

Thank you very much for your suggestion! I'll let you know if it works.

Bye
Cris

Criguada

Pete,
unfortunately it seems /CD works only in APIC mode, but since my box doesn't do SMP I'm working in PIC mode.
Nevertheless I'll try adding it to config.sys, and see what happens.

Thankyou
Bye
Cris

Pete

Hi Chris

Using PIC mode means no possibility of using "high" IRQs which leads into the question: Had you booted Windows prior to this problem starting?

I have seen USB drive access problems caused by Windows setting IRQs high and when rebooting to another OS it cannot use the device - usually a Power Off resolves that issue, rebooting does not.

I doubt if that is the problem though...

I suggest a double check that the drivers you think are in use are actually in use ie make sure that all drivers involved including os2dasd.dmd are up to date and are the drivers loaded at boot - check config.sys related statements.

USBcfg will report all USB driver versions involved and
bldlevel os2dasd.dmd
will report the version installed.

You should see version 10.162 for USB Controllers and Mass Storage and 14.104 as the os2dasd.dmd bldlevel

If you have all the correct drivers and are sure those are the drivers being loaded at boot - and the above Windows IRQ bit does not apply - then you are back to the interaction of whichever ACPI package you have installed with the drivers involved or an ACPI misconfiguration of some sort.


For what it is worth I have seen many posts stating that the only ACPI package that works reasonably well with nForce4 chipsets is v2.22 - lucky for me as that is the only version that I have had access to  :-)

Not sure if the above is true for earlier/later nForce chipsets but may be worth investigating.

Probably my final words (until something else springs to mind as a possible "cure"): Check for a mainboard BIOS update for your system; many flaky things get cured by hardware BIOS/FIRMWARE updates - applies to consumer goods such as dvd recorders as well as computer hardware.

Sorry about the length of the book but hope something above helps.

Pete


Criguada

Pete,
your help is very welcome. I'll try and see what I can do.

Thank you
Bye
Cris

Saijin_Naib

Have your motherboard manual out in case the BIOS flash goes awry, I had to do that recently for my friends nForce board. We needed to clear the CMOS.
God, BIOS updates give me the shivers  :o

Pete

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2007.11.15, 20:40:31
Have your motherboard manual out in case the BIOS flash goes awry, I had to do that recently for my friends nForce board. We needed to clear the CMOS.
God, BIOS updates give me the shivers  :o


I think it is all a matter of confidence but here are some tips that apply to all Hardware/Firmware updates:-

Make sure that you can revert to a known working (the current - usually) version if things go wrong by either downloading the version or, usually an option with BIOS updates, Backup the current version.

Make sure that any tools involved are at the correct level for the update being applied

Read any related docs thoroughly - might even be worth a Google


Having updated many Hardware/Firmware bits over the years I have only seen the very occasional problem; in some cases the Firmware update was flaky and in others Users had failed to understand and follow instructions fully.


Regards

Pete



Criguada

Hi Pete,
it seems /CD cured my problem!!!!
Even if the docs say that /CD is to be used only in conjunction with SMP mode (APIC), I tried it nevertheless and actually succeeded!

Thank you very much for your help Pete!

Oh, and BTW, my chipset is an nForce5.

Bye
Cris

Pete

Hi Cris

Nice to know that the nForce4 and 5 chipsets are considered part of the "Crazy Device" family by the ACPI developers  :-)


Glad it has resolved the USB problem

Pete