USB works intermittantly

[jonnyb]

Got a Dell Presion tower and some devices work in the usb ports and some do not. Some memory sticks work fine but others give me a usb error in Device Mgr. Same as some external hard drives. It does show that some devices are connected but the indication in Device Manager says that drivers are not loaded with the yellow exclaimation point. The device then does not work.

Some work fine though is strange.

Could it have something to do with Service Pack 3 with XP Pro?

Is there some setting in the bios that I need to tweak?

[Train]

Remove all USB items in device manager and reboot. Sounds like something is corrupted and that should fix it.

This has nothing to do with XP, sp 1, SP 2, SP 3 or the BIOS.

Heck for all know, those sticks that are not being picked up need to be thrown into the garbage.

[jonnyb]

I did that twice. We have an external hard drive that will not complete the install thru the USB either.

All devices work on an older computer right away when we plug them in though so we know that these devices work.

I was thinking that they are wired improperly but my personal thumb drive works perfectly when I use the USB's in question. So I know they work.

We just bought a brand new USB thumb drive yesterday and it shows up as unrecognized usb device in Dev Mgr. But it does generate the indication in the Dev Mgr right away. So the usbs are reading a device.

This Windows installation is only a month old and the bios has been updated.

[Train]

USB ports maybe damamged ???

Try different ports, it should work somewhere.

[Steve R Jones]

Did you install the chipset drivers etc off Dell's web site?

[jonnyb]

I'm pretty sure that I put the chipset drivers from Dell on there as well. There are four usbs, two in the back, two in the front that is two headers on the tower. If they work perfectly with my 1 gig usb stick then I would think that they are fine. Tried that 5, 6 times.

[jonnyb]

Could it have something to do with power to the hubs? I have a powered hub that I could plug into one of them and use the power from this particular hub to help.

I have seen this problem before in other computers where you have a device in one usb and another one will fail until I pull the orginal device out of the usbs and plug in the second device and the second one works fine.

Why would it say unrecognizable usb device though. That is really wierd. Would a power issue to the hub header do this?

[Train]

No weird, just not enough electrical power get to teh one that needs as the other stuff is pulling power.

Normal happening.

[jonnyb]

No weird, just not enough electrical power get to teh one that needs as the other stuff is pulling power.

Normal happening.

I am having a little tough time trying to understand what you are saying, sorry.

R U saying that the mobo is not getting enough power from the PS to power two usb devices in this case where you have to pull one to get the other to work?

In the case of the Dell Precision though, I am going to download this usb driver from Microsoft to see if I can see any device that gets put into it.

Then I will try the Assigning the CD drive another Letter.

If none of this works I have a PCI Usb device that I will stick into the pc.

[Train]

The mobo has a total output for all USB devices. 500ma if I remember right. Looks to me you are exceeding that limit.

[SuperSparks]

It's 500mA for each device.

[jonnyb]

I don't know why if a computer is built with 4 usbs that it cannot run them. A brand name computer too.

[Train]

It's 500mA for each device.

Thank you!

[jonnyb]

I bit the bullet and formatted and reinstalled and now the usbs all work great. Nothing that I read and tried worked at all. Not even close. Now everything works like new.

[Train]

Sometimes that is what it takes. ;(