At 15:13 12/02/05, Winterlight wrote:
I have two fairly modern workstations. One is based around a Asus
PC DL Deluxe, and one is a Intel 865PERL. Both are around 18 months
old, and come with at least six onboard USB2 ports. I can't boot off
any USB flash drive, or even leave a USB drive connected during a
boot up, and I can't figure out why.
I had a similar problem with USB compact flash drives and Windows 2000
on two systems with Asus motherboards. (Older systems than yours...P2B-D
boards, each with dual PIII-1400 processors.)
I got blue screens at boot every time if I left a flash card in the USB
reader.
I first started using compact flash cards in a USB card reader well
before SP3 or SP4 were released. I had to install a Win2k driver (supplied
by Crucial) to get the card reader to work. (I seem to recall that native
support for these devices was introduced with one of the late service
packs...but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my USB got screwed up some other way
back then.)
Anyway, the blue screens at boot (if the memory card was left in the
reader)
continued until a few months ago when I removed all USB devices and drivers
(Add/Remove Hardware in Control Panel with Show Hidden Devices enabled...to
show all instances of the USB ports and hubs and memory devices.) When I
rebooted, Windows detected the USB stuff but insisted on reloading the
same drivers (some "Genuide" file from the Win2k folder on the CDROM
that came with Crucial's Compact Flash card reader). I had to delete
these drivers manually from the WINNT/INF folder to keep them from being
installed by Windows. After deleting all the USB devices using Add/Remove
Hardware again, I was finally able to install native drivers for all
USB ports and hubs. (I chose "Windows Update" as the source of the drivers
when Windows asked me for a location for the drivers.) After all this,
removable USB stuff is automatically detected with no drivers required.
No problems now...although I've never tried to boot from a USB flash card.
(If Windows has to write a lot to the flash card, that might be a bad
thing. You have a lifetime of what, only a thousand or so writes on each
memory cell on these flash cards? I'd rather do writes and erases of
pictures or files instead of system files and data like that.)
The above applies to both the native USB1 ports on the motherboard
-and- the USB2 ports on various PCI cards that I have used in these
computers. (Right now I'm using SIIG combo cards with Fast Ethernet,
USB2, and Firewire ports because I was running out of free PCI slots.)
Regards,
Bill
