ODD USB problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Philip Nicholls
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Philip Nicholls

A year ago I purchased an external disk enclosure and a 120GB ATA100
Drive to use for backups. Recently, every time I connect it to the
front USB ports it causes my system to freeze. Keyboard is dead,
mouse is dead. I've left it for 15-20 minutes and then just press
reset.

All other USB devices (thumb drive, ipod shuffle are the only two I
use) work fine in the front USB. Also, the hard drive works fine in
the rear usb ports and on the usb hub connected to the rear usb ports
on my wife's computer.

Recently I plugged the cable for the drive into a front port after
trying a couple of fixes gleaned from google searches and the system
froze before I turned the drive on. Yet, the damn thing works fine in
the rear USB.

Anyone go a clue here?

Asrock 939 SATA Dual MB
Athlon 64 3800+ 2.2Ghz Venice Core
1 512MB sticks of Corsair value select DDR400
Two 80G WD SATA hard drives.
Vantec Ion 400W power supple.
Gigabyte Geforce 7300GT PCE Express video card (most recently added
part).
 
Philip said:
A year ago I purchased an external disk enclosure and a 120GB ATA100
Drive to use for backups. Recently, every time I connect it to the
front USB ports it causes my system to freeze. Keyboard is dead,
mouse is dead. I've left it for 15-20 minutes and then just press
reset.

All other USB devices (thumb drive, ipod shuffle are the only two I
use) work fine in the front USB. Also, the hard drive works fine in
the rear usb ports and on the usb hub connected to the rear usb ports
on my wife's computer.

Recently I plugged the cable for the drive into a front port after
trying a couple of fixes gleaned from google searches and the system
froze before I turned the drive on. Yet, the damn thing works fine in
the rear USB.

Anyone go a clue here?

Asrock 939 SATA Dual MB
Athlon 64 3800+ 2.2Ghz Venice Core
1 512MB sticks of Corsair value select DDR400
Two 80G WD SATA hard drives.
Vantec Ion 400W power supple.
Gigabyte Geforce 7300GT PCE Express video card (most recently added
part).
Click to expand...

What position is the PS2_USB_PWR1 jumper set to, in the upper left
hand corner of the motherboard ? It looks like Asrock runs all USB
and PS/2 power through one jumper. If you choose +5VSB for the jumper,
that leaves the USB ports powered when the computer is in S3 suspend
to RAM, for example. If the jumper is set to +5V, then the ports
are unpowered during sleep, and you would not be able to wake the
computer via the USB or PS/2 ports, if the devices aren't powered.
I would choose +5V for this jumper, unless there was a need to wake
the computer via some USB or PS/2 device. The +5V rail is stronger
than the +5VSB rail.

The freezing itself doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but perhaps
that jumper is a common element to PS/2 and USB devices being
ineffective, at the same time. If the +5VSB was overloaded on the
power supply, the most likely result would be a reboot, and not a
freeze. If there was a Polyfuse (recoverable fuse) on that
power path, if the fuse opens, then the computer should not be
frozen, but you'd lose the use of the PS/2 keyboard and mouse,
as they would not be powered.

So I still don't have an explanation for a freeze. (One way to test
a frozen machine, is to use the "ping" command from a second computer.
The last time I had a computer freeze up on me, the computer would
actually return a response to a "ping" command sent from another
computer. That told me that in fact the computer was not
frozen in the classical sense, but it was no longer responding to
user input from the console. I still had to reset it to recover,
but at least I knew it wasn't a hardware problem, as the OS was
still running, albeit in a useless state. It would not respond
to ctrl-alt-delete, but it was ping-able.)

The next time it freezes, try pinging it from another computer.
If it answers, then you know that the TCP/IP stack is still
operating, and so there must be a live kernel there as well.

While I don't have access to this, another thing you could
try is Remote Desktop. If you have the software for it, set
up the freezing machine, so it can potentially be logged into,
from a second machine. If you can control the machine, from
a second computer, while it is "frozen", then you know you
only have an I/O problem and not a real freeze.

Also, if the mouse is optical, and has a nice red LED on it,
check whether the LED is lit when the freeze occurs. I sometimes
use a cheap USB mouse, as a "port power" detector. If the mouse
LED lights, then I know there is power available on the port.

Paul
 
Philip said:
A year ago I purchased an external disk enclosure and a 120GB ATA100
Drive to use for backups. Recently, every time I connect it to the
front USB ports it causes my system to freeze. Keyboard is dead,
mouse is dead. I've left it for 15-20 minutes and then just press
reset.

All other USB devices (thumb drive, ipod shuffle are the only two I
use) work fine in the front USB. Also, the hard drive works fine in
the rear usb ports and on the usb hub connected to the rear usb ports
on my wife's computer.

Recently I plugged the cable for the drive into a front port after
trying a couple of fixes gleaned from google searches and the system
froze before I turned the drive on. Yet, the damn thing works fine in
the rear USB.

Anyone go a clue here?

Asrock 939 SATA Dual MB
Athlon 64 3800+ 2.2Ghz Venice Core
1 512MB sticks of Corsair value select DDR400
Two 80G WD SATA hard drives.
Vantec Ion 400W power supple.
Gigabyte Geforce 7300GT PCE Express video card (most recently added
part).
Click to expand...

Maybe the rear USB port is enabled for drive-required USB2? There might
be native USB feeding the front and a more capable spec-2 card driving
rear ports. Also, check device drivers.
 
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