USB Mass Storage Trouble

Hercules286

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 12, 2007
Messages
1,663
Location
Sofia, Bulgaria
...so my laptop (Acer Aspire 3020) is acting... unpredictably whenever I insert a USB Mass Storage device in its USB port. Sometimes it works, sometimes it says "Cannot recognize USB, GFY. And oh, by the way, here's a driver for unknown devices that does nothing and only gets in your way" which isn't very nice of it. It does that with a variety of devices and so far I haven't been able to notice any pattern on what works and when.

So, I deleted all USB drivers from Hardware Manager and that worked... 2 times until it acted up again. So I deleted them again. No effect. Then I repair-installed XP (yea by the way it's XP SP2). That didn't work either.

So I installed another version of XP called Black Edition. That worked once, and then I got the Unknown Device bull again. BTW, I wouldn't recommend XP BE.

My GF says it acted up with the mouse yesterday, but when she restarted the PC the problem went away.

Any ideas?
 
I tried all ports and no, Acer have nothing in the way of chipset drivers on their website.

They DO have a new BIOS version there, though. Could that work? (I'm not at home so I can't try it)
 
To rule out a software/driver issue, burn a Live CD with Ubuntu or Knoppix and see if the USB ports work in a different OS environment (other than Windows).
 
That's happened to me a few times. There's something flaky with the hardware somewhere along the line. It could be as simple as using a different cable.
 
That's happened to me a few times. There's something flaky with the hardware somewhere along the line. It could be as simple as using a different cable.

Actually, I never thought about the cable. o_O That's an excellent point there. Thanks, will try.
 
Top