USB 2.0 on older hardware

April 6, 2005 7:54 AM

How do I get USB 2.0 to work on my ageing PC?

My PC is getting on a bit these days. It has a USB 1.1 port which works fine. I recently bought a PCI USB 2.0 card, but no USB 2.0 devices seem to be recognised. The card itself I think is fine, since my digital camera can use one of the sockets (it's a 1.1 device). My iRiver doesn't seem to be at fault, since I can connect it with one of the existing 1.1 sockets. I don't think it's an operating system/software issue, as I'm seeing the same behaviour in both Windows 98SE and linux. (In both cases, a hardware probe recognises that there is a USB 2.0 card connected.)

So what else could it be? Is it possible that it's a motherboard or BIOS issue? In which case, what can I do about it? The m/b is a VIA K7T266.

posted by salmacis to computers & internet (7 comments total)

USB 2.0 is not natively supported by 98 or 98SE. You'll need to upgrade to 2000/XP or see if your card vendor offers their own drivers.

Here is some info on USB 2.0 support (or not) in Linux.
posted by mkultra at 7:58 AM on April 6, 2005

I don't think it's a driver issue, since USB 2.0 is supported in linux (I'm using the 2.6 kernel with SuSE 9.1). In addition, both the card and the hard disk cradle came with driver disks for Win 98SE.
posted by salmacis at 8:19 AM on April 6, 2005

Have you tried watching the log (in linux) while connecting a device?
posted by bh at 10:03 AM on April 6, 2005

Yup..

Apr  6 22:03:35 linux kernel: usb 4-5: new high speed USB device using address 2
Apr  6 22:03:35 linux kernel: usb 4-5: device not accepting address 2, error -71
Apr  6 22:03:35 linux kernel: usb 4-5: new high speed USB device using address 3
Apr  6 22:03:36 linux kernel: usb 4-5: device not accepting address 3, error -71

posted by salmacis at 2:00 PM on April 6, 2005

Was this a cheap card? Cheap cards of all sorts sometimes exhibit weird behavior.
posted by angry modem at 2:25 PM on April 6, 2005

I'm a bit short on time, but a bit of googling suggested:
Most likely:
Plug in the iriver. It might be a power issue. USB 2 takes more power, or thinks it does.

Less likely:
Pass pci=noacpi to the kernel. Less likely because this is Linux only.
posted by bh at 6:13 PM on April 6, 2005

noacpi is the default. It's not power, since the hard drive cradle has it's own power supply.
posted by salmacis at 12:53 AM on April 7, 2005