Re: BUFFALO WLI-U2-KG54-AI USB adaptor stopped being 'recognized'

Thanks very much for all this feedback Jeff and John.

There are so many leads, and each takes so many trials on the equipment to
see what happens, that it has taken me some time to look at it all - and I
have to admit, I am still somewhat mystified! I hope people have the
patience to follow all the interleaving of remarks below, but at this stage
I am not sure how I could unpick it all! The results with USBDeview may be
most enlightening to you both, so I'll try and copy them in somewhere...

"Jeff Liebermann" <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ejgct2p8hsn3dfbjtt6dfasetujum1b6nv@xxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 19:50:54 GMT, "spamlet"
<spam.morespam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for the analysis Jeff:

Yeah, but I seem to have missed a few important points.

I have the data *** for the KG54AI in front of me and it clearly says
"USB 2.0/1.1"

Ok, I'll be blunt. They might be lying. I've seen a few failures
(all with Dlink USB wireless hardware) where it won't work reliably
with USB 1.1.

The "AI" stands for auto install

Groan. New and improved. Welcome to the wrong end of the learning
curve. I recently bought some Sandisk USB flash dongles that included
software by U3 for auto installing their drivers (for running
applications from the flash drive). It shows up as a CDROM under "My
Computer". Worked fine for W2K and XP. Hung horribly on WinME and
Win98 (not SE). When I downloaded and ran the U3 removal tool, it
magically now works on WinMe. I haven't tried all the combinations of
operating system, USB 1.1/2.0, USB chipset, or autostart options, but
suspect that there's a connection with the hang problem. Unforunately,
there doesn't seem to be a way to remove the virtual cdrom drive and
it's friend the auto installer.

I'm tending to agree with you on the 'new and improved bit': I'm afraid I
was foolishly thinking in terms of portability and ease of use, rather than
what that actually meant for the workings of the device itself! Interesting
note about U3, which I had not heard about until recently when I watched a
friend trying to chose a new USB flash drive from the hundreds: the idea of
carrying one's software and data on the one device and plugging it in
anywhere is most appealing, but as you say, fraught with booby traps - not
the least will be all the conflicting permissions from device to device.


and that is why a pc at first sees it as a
disc drive before the autoinstall programme kicks in. There is no question
of having to load any software before plugging in this particular device -
which is why I bought it!

Yep. It sure would be a nifty feature if it worked. The problem I
see is that the virtual cdrom drive might be read only. If Buffalo
made a mistake on the driver, or some MS update broke the driver,
there's no easy way to fix it.

That is an interesting point: I will see if there is a way in via it's
still - for as yet unknown reason - being visible to the pc.
One would imagine it would have to be read only to prevent accidental
writing to it as if it was an ordinary flash drive, but I'm not sure if it
remains 'explorable' once it has set itself up as a wireless device (NO:
disappears from the 'drives' once installed).

.... As it turns out I do not seem to be able to see any security tabs or
read only tick boxes for any of the properties sheets associated with the
device as a drive. The individual set up files on the drive do have read
only attributes ticked but still no security *** by which permissions
could be set. When I untick the read only attribute I am informed that I do
not have permission to change, but am still asked if I want to go ahead
anyway. I did... makes no difference to the way the laptop sees it.

What I find is that the laptop appears to recognize the device briefly if it
is first ejected by the safe eject procedure on the pc, and I did in fact
manage to load the drivers from the cd after doing this, but even with the
drivers installed, the adaptor still is not recognized when one actually
wants to use it.


(Though the 'package' that comes with the device
does include a cd with the same software on, there is no indication that
this should be used first, and unless one resets the auto install switch
on
the side of the device first, it would presumably ignore the cd in any
case.)

Ouch. Y'er right. It's the chicken or egg problem. If the cdrom
drive is writeable (fat chance), then you might be able to rename the
autorun.inf file which will prevent it from running an install script.

It seems that the device is not recognized before it gets to the auto run
stage unfortunately. Actually, it seems that there are several stages of
recognition and which one it gets stuck at seems to be rather random.


The details of the D-link adaptor on our pc are not relevant: only that
the
install programme of the K54AI played havoc with our settings for this so
we had to do a system restore to get them back.

Actually, the DLink horror story was only in reference to the USB 1.1
compatibility issue. In view of the problems that you seem to be
having with the installer, it's possible that either it wasn't
properly tested with legacy hardware, or there's some manner of
conflict. Frankly, I don't know.

The USB2 minihub that works fine on the laptop is a Sitecom Pocket HUB
CN-032 (don't know off hand what it's power consumption is but it is rated
at input 5v 2500mA MAX.)

<http://www.sitecom.com/product.php?productname=USB+2.0+pocket+hub&productcode=CN-032&productid=269&subgroupid=2>
No power supply included. That means that the power drain available to
everything plugged into this hub is 500ma maximum. It's more with the
power supply, but apparently you don't have one.

The problem is rather lame. The standard USB 1.1 or 2.0 port will
supply 5V at 500ma just fine. However, during the initialization
phase, the maximum load can only be 200ma. That's to prevent a single
device from hogging all the power, shutting down communications, and
thus preventing the USB chipset from determining the total current
requirments. If you have an overloaded USB hub, and no additional
power supply, then the load during initialization might be excessive
even if the hub can later supply the necessary current.

Try it without the hub.

Only used the hub as a check that the laptop was able to recognize USB2
devices in addition to my ordinary flash drives.


The K54AI is rated at 1452mW (max). I don't know what the ratings of the
laptop's USB ports would be.

It's within specifications. Maximum source power is 5Volts at 500ma
or 2.5 watts per port. 1.45 watts will well under maximum. By
itself, that's not a problem. But if you have a memory dongle, mouse,
keyboard, printer, in addition to the wireless plugged into a single
USB port, without the benifits of an external power source on the hub,
I'm fairly sure it will be a problem.

That's very handy info on the power situation thanks: and rather eliminates
that as the cause of the Buffalo problem. We don't often connect the laptop
to other external devices than the router and the power supply, but it will
be useful to bear your points in mind for the future.


"> 2. Uninstall the Buffalo driver and client manager using Add and
Remove. Also, clean up any mess you made mangling the USB drivers
using the latest downloads from the Dell site."

As noted, there is no Buffalo stuff on the laptop to uninstall as far as I
can see (and I have tried VERY hard to find it.)

Actually, I have to come clean and say that I only just noticed that there
is a 'show hidden devices' option in the views of the device manager (Why
hide any?), and indeed, the newly successfully loaded Buffalo driver comes
under the hidden ones - but I can't say if it was there in earlier searches
(does not seem likely if Agent Ransac didn't find it).


Well, hacking the registry should have found it. Did you find the
.REG file inside the drivers as I suggested? That should give you a
list of the OID's in the registry.

Otherwise, try:
Control Panel -> Add/remove Hardware
and display a list of drivers. The Buffalo driver should be in there
along with literally every device that was ever plugged into the
computer.

I made no mess 'mangling' any drivers: they work just fine for everything
else.

I wasn't sure you knew what you were doing hacking the registry.
Partly removing a driver is a great way to make a mess. I know
because I've done it all too often (usually in desperation).

As I mentioned, I sought out the correct set of drivers from Dell for the
chipset that is in the laptop, and ran the install programme that came
with
this, and it informed me that no update was necessary.

Well, then try something simple. Display the device manager and
remove every single item under USB devices that's associated with the
computer (not with whatever is plugged into the computer). Reboot and
let plug-n-play put it all back. It seems to unscramble things when I
do that.

Done that numerous times. Even tried loading extra drivers from an
extensive search of the Windows Update Catalogue for drivers from the same
manufacturers as for the components on my system, but the search for new
hardware, and search for better driver options never come up with anything
better (so it says) than the ones that are already in place.

I don't really understand how to change drivers: if I download a driver and
then 'point' the installer wizard at it I am just told that the wizard
cannot find a better match than what I already have - no indication that it
has even found any other drivers. On the other hand, having discovered that
right clicking the .inf file for any of these drivers gives me an 'install'
option on right click, this seems to do something but there is then still no
way to get a device to try and use what one has just installed without said
wizard, which only seems to search for the driver one already has!


I did ask whether
(and if so how) I should uninstall the existing chipset driver suite
before
running this install programme, but nobody has given me any feedback on
this
yet.

I tried. You were on the right track in the registry. The problem is
that I'm not sure you have all the OID's involved. That's what
digging out the .REG file will do. If you can't find it, I might be
able to excavate it from the downloadable driver.

There were no .REG files but there were keys mentioned in the .INF files,
that seem to amount to much the same thing where drivers are concerned.
These have proven interesting, but not really shown any useful light on the
reason for this particular problem. You also seem to be referring to the
adaptor for REG info, though my original request was for info on any
uninstalling of Dell software that might be required before updating the
laptop's chipset from Dell/Intel. Now I have compared the set on the pc
with that on the
laptop, and found most of the drivers are the same. A couple of different
ones I copied over just in case to the drivers and dll's folders on the
laptop, but again nothing new turned up in the way of laptop behaviour.

There is a difference in that the pc seems to use something called Odyssey
Network Service Miniport, as part of the description of the Buffalo under
Network Adaptors, and for both the BUffalo and the D-Link there are both
'Odyssey Network Services Miniport', and 'Packet Scheduler Miniport', listed
under network adaptors.

There is no sign of any Odyssey stuff on the laptop, and a web search shows
that the manufacturer has been taken over and links to downloads of the
driver all lead to the same dead end. As it turns out, a number of the
leads on this also lead to people trying to get rid of the Odyssey in any
case, so it is probably not required!


As I mentioned: I can't install the driver any more because, since it
stopped being 'recognized' the install programme cannot see it when it is
'plugged in when asked': all this does is send the programme into limbo
until one cancels it!

Well, then since it worked the first time, the options are to either
manually remove all instances of the driver from the registry, or try
the hardware wizard to remove it.

It seems I have now found a get around (Use and 'remove safely' on the pc
first.) that has enabled me to reinstall the driver, but once the device
has been recognized by the install disc
sufficiently to complete the installation, it then drops out to being an
unrecognized USB device once the install programme has finished running.
Tantalisingly nearer to a fix, but still not there yet!

Also, now that I have been able to inspect the files actually on the device
via the pc, I find a txt file that has a list of 'known issues'.
Unfortunately, this has suffered in the translation, but seems to indicate
that if the device is not shut down properly before it is uninstalled (here
it is unclear whether this means unplugged or actually uninstalling the
driver) it may not be recognized when it is plugged back in. One is
referred on to '5. Uninstalling'... but there is, unfortunately no 5. !


Not funny! During this exercise I have found a surprising number of
different ways to access Device Manager, and it has never (since this
problem arose) contained anything about Buffalo adaptors.

Impossible. Unless is borrows a driver (or hides it perhaps), there
has to be some manner of USB driver showing under Network Devices.

See above for found hidden devices, but the USB device is still only
recognized as unknown in the devices attached to the hubs. (This may
sometimes be after it has gone through a sequence of 'new USB device found',
'device installed and ready to use'; 'USB device not recognized'. Once, I
did manage to get it to pretend it had found the device and was contacting
the router, but as soon as you click 'fix' after it has been 'trying' for
some time... it drops back to, 'device unable to start, error 10' and then
back to device not recognized. What would actually be happening when
'device was unable to start'?)

All this time it still works in the pc and even seems to be able to work in
tandem with the D-Link as a combined adaptor to speed up
transmission/reception.


It also has the
rather irritating habit of sticking my 'unknown device' in as if it was an
extra root hub, even though it is clearly appended to one of the two real
ones!

Not irritating but actually very important.
<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314464>
There are several programs that translate the device ID number to
something readable by humans. The problem is that they only seem to
know about PCI devices. I think *not sure* they will show some USB
device. See:
<http://www.zhangduo.com/udi.html>
<http://www.zhangduo.com/driverbackup.html>
<http://www.surfpack.com/downloads/USBDeview/46177.html>
There are others. Search for "unknown devices usb".

Also, download and extract (no install) the latest MS Process
Explorer:
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx>
and see if there's something that says Buffalo still running.


These all very useful suggestions: and one begins to see some possibilities
when running Process Explorer; Device Manager and USBDeview side by side.

It seems that the device is recognized as 4 different things, and in the
laptop there is no consistency as to which will be 'chosen'.

The USBDeview info from the pc tells me:

Created by using USBDeview
Device Name Description Device Type Connected Safe To Unplug Drive
Letter Serial Number Created Date Last Plug/Unplug Date VendorID
ProductID USB Class USB SubClass USB Protocol Hub / Port Computer Name

WLI-U2-KG54-AI BUFFALO WLI-U2-KG54-CD USB Device Vendor Specific No No
000D0B9FC5D5 23/02/2007 15:37:23 N/A 0411 0067 ff ff ff
WLI-U2-KG54-AI BUFFALO WLI-U2-KG54-CD USB Device HID (Human Interface
Device) No Yes 000D0B9FC5D5 11/02/2007 17:10:26 N/A 0411 006c 03
01 01
WLI-U2-KG54-AI BUFFALO WLI-U2-KG54-CD USB Device Mass Storage No No
000D0B9FC5D5 11/02/2007 17:10:47 N/A 0411 006d 08 06 50


To which one must add the ones that come up as 'unknown devices'! The
device is currently registering as the 'Vendor Specific' option when I plug
it into the pc, and I would infer that the other two instances are from its
first plug in when it was categorised as an HID, then a few seconds later,
as its autoinstall files were being read, as a Mass Storage Device (only a
few megabytes, and shown as a full drive by the way), and then it eventually
settled as device 0067 - but notice that even here it is not labelled as a
wireless lan adaptor though this is what it shows up as in Device Manager.

But it still is a wonder that the pc can manage to sort this all out, but
the laptop cannot. In the laptop I have occasionally got it as far as
having both ID 0067 and 006c, but 006d only ever shows up on the pc (so
far).

This last point reminds me to say that the laptop has a read only Samsung cd
drive and I had wondered if this had something to do with the laptop being
unable to 'start' a device that was pretending for a few seconds, to be a
disc drive (ie the '006d' stage). Again, I tried downloading extra Samsung
drivers, but do not have a clue as to how they might be successfully
associated with the transient 'virtual' drive on the adaptor.

John says that he tries to 'completely erase' the auto install part of these
devices. If he means that he somehow opens the adaptor as a drive and then
deletes some of the files, I would like to know which and how: because
presumably one cannot delete the thing that makes it seem like a drive, when
one needs to have it open as a drive in order to see them! In similar vein:
where is the device identity on the adaptor so that it might be rewritten in
the hope of getting some consistency in the way it is being recognised? As
the device is now working as a network adaptor as soon as it is plugged into
the pc I can no longer 'explore' it in the way I could previously.
Presumably I would have to strip all reference to it from the pc before I
could again just view it as a drive and make any changes to its files. What
one presumably needs to achieve is a complete removal of the device
identities as 'HID' and 'Mass Storage Device', from the device itself, so
that it can only be recognised as the LAN adaptor and won't confuse the
laptop any more...

All rather confusing: if interesting!

Meanwhile Buffalo helpdesk have actually come back with the simple
suggestion of trying with the auto install switch in the other position:
they are way behind the rest of you! Perhaps I should try and get them to
read this thread.

Thanks once again for all the very enlightening comments.

That occasional warning that 'device is unable to start' does rather still
hint that there may be some power loss problem in the laptop's USB outlets -
if this is refering to the wireless transmitter - :
how can I check this? On the other hand, if it really is that 'virtual cd'
that cannot be started, that would pint to it not being a power problem...

Steve_H
..






.