I have a PCI card which adds 3 USB 2.0 ports and 2 Firewire ports to my computer. It has always behaved weirdly - previously it would work from a fresh boot but, on returning from hibernation, the USB ports would supply power but not transfer data (i.e. no device would be detected, so USB-powered speakers which receive audio through a separate cable from the sound card work, but a USB mouse does not). This seems like it could have been some power management issue, but I couldn’t solve it.
Now the behaviour has got weirder:
At the moment the card only works properly after a reboot. i.e. I turn my computer on and the card only supplies power. If I restart it it works properly. But if I fully power off before restarting it (e.g. by hibernating or shutting down), it doesn’t work.
However, I don’t need to fully boot to get it working. If I get to the boot menu and hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, it then works fine. But that is still pretty annoying.
The card is an InnoVISION DM-1002. The machine is an Athlon 1.2GHz on a Gigabyte 7IXE4 motherboard running Windows XP SP2. The card is an InnoVISION DM-1002.
InnoVISION tech support have been no help, but I know the teeming millions can do better!
I assume that you are doing the restart with a peripheral plugged in? I’ve had similar things happen due to initial current load (the USB ports, which never put out that much power to begin with, seemed to lose some output capacity over time) EXCEPT then I’d expect the mouse to work and the speakers to not register.
Oh, well, I’m stumped. But there a few other things I’d try for quick fix;
Try enabling “Legacy USB devices”. This allows USB keyboard and mice to be used *during the boot process. In your case it might give the mouse more time to 'juice up" before the OS want to talk to it about its identity
Try increasing the PCI delay. New cards rarely need this, but again its extra time to juice up before the OS tries to talk to it.
Hey, when I was young, I needed a little extra time to power up before was ready to talk to anyone, too.
See if un-/re-plugging causes the OS to recognize the device
Check your cables. USB cables do go bad, like pretty much any other (I’d always been amazed at regularly MIDI/computer/etc. cables fail, while other, very similar cables seem to last forever. The connections inside the plug are a big reason, but having repaired many a cable, I’ve often seen failures in the middle of cables that run unpinched and undisturbed (e.g. behind a desk). Once upon a time the “factory supplied” cables seemed to be superior to many third-party replacements, but over the last 10-15 years, they increasingly seem to go out of their way to use failure-prone cable. It’s like they resent including cables at all.
I agree my first instinct would be to check the power management features and the devide properties to see if the “the computer may turn this off to save power”. Many peripherals are touchy about being power starved.
If its not that:
Card firmly seated in its slot?
Most recent driver installed?
All windows updates in place?
Also you may want to look up the specs on the card, some cards and especially laptops looking to save a few milliamps do not deliver full power (500mA IIRC) to the USB ports making for erratic behavior from many USB devices.
Combo USB _Firewire cards need multiple IRQs and IIRC this can occasionally confuse the OS when you have a combo card as it’s difficult for the system to arbitrate these addresses if the hardware is sitting in single PCI slot.
Make sure the MB BIOS has no fixed IRQ assignments beyond the usual system stuff. SHUT OFF or defeat any unused ports grabbing IRQs such as unused COM ports or parallel ports. Remove any modems (if possible) if they are not being used. This may require moving some MB jumpers on older boards.
Make sure no other hardware devices are sharing IRQs with the USB-Firewire assigned IRQs.
I’m guessing that the card isn’t booting fast enough to be ready when the BIOS scans for devices. The computer doesn’t see the device during the PCI configuration, so it never gets allocated resources and never works.
Go into the BIOS and see if there is an option for fast boot or quick boot or some such. If there is, make sure it is disabled.
The IRQ allocations are exactly the same when the card is working and when it isn’t.
Turning off fast boot introduces a greater delay than when resetting at the boot menu when fast booting is on, but doesn’t make the card work. So it isn’t a simple timing issue.
What is different between a PC that has just been powered up and one that has been rebooted?