Re: USB sub-system: more observations and some conclusions

Peter Brown wrote:
Hi Victor 

[cuts]

Having DEVICE=D:\OS2\BOOT\USBCOM.SYS CDS:0 still resulted in the WPS hanging before the Warp Centre appears. Then I noticed that my USBCOM.sys was dated 2002 and I had one dated 2004 which I had failed to copy over. Now I've done that but can't yet report on the effect of that because...

Err... Is that some sort of copy'n'paste error? 

  Oops yes.


USBCOM.SYS (USB Modem) does not have a /CDS: parameter.

I'm guessing that you mean USBCDROM.ADD. 

  Yes


Using the USB settings notebook you could just uncheck the USBCD/DVD support and that would resolve that problem by rewriting the config.sys without any USBCDROM.ADD line at all - or edit config.sys manually and REM the line eg:-

REM ***** BASEDEV=USBCDROM.ADD

As I mentioned a couple of times I can't do this. When remmed out, the WPS hangs after the sound emits and before the Warpcenter tries to come up. Removing the Warpcenter from the SET AUTOSTART spec has no effect.


I deferred to Bill H's urging to update the BIOS. Well having done that the damn #@%$&* mainboard has stopped working!!!! The Gigabyte site was ambigous in having two files to apply. I tried one and the QFlash utility said this was the wrong update so I tried the other one. It went thru and said the update was successful and said to restart. That was the last time I saw anything on the screen. I removed every card on the board and tried again. Same - nothing. I've done flash bios updates many times before (on customer's machines!) know it is absolutely essential to have the correct update, this time I tried as usual to be sure I have the correct update and still it fails! I think Gigabyte has let me down. There is no chance of rolling back. The board doesn't dual BIOSs. I will have to go thru the fuss and bother of getting a warranty replacement.



I have had that happen after flashing a mainboard BIOS. I was very lucky in that the system, although not displaying anything onscreen, seemed to be trying to boot from the floppy drive.

I put together a floppy disk with the previous BIOS and flashing tool and a batch file to kick it all off and "rescued" that mainboard as the floppy drive was working and booted OK.

Hmm interesting. However I didn't bother to save a copy of the original bios.


This is posted from my Windoze machine. Don't know when OS/2 will be back up.

_Backtracking_ the story:
When the system came backup with the settings your USBCfg setup I got 2 phantom drives instead of 1 and even more strangely my LAN connection stopped! After remming out all the four BASEDEV=USBUHCD.sys lines and restarting my LAN was back. There were still 4 phantom drives. 



Do you have a requirement for 4 * usbuhcd.sys lines?

What does the Controllers Available (in Red) show about how many of what type of Controller you have available? You should set Controllers Installed to match those quantities - having said that rereading a section above it seems that is what you have done.

What nic is in use - could be an IRQ sharing problem with the nic drivers. 

  A D-Link 528 which uses a RTL8029AS chip.


"phantom drives" are caused by incorrect parameters applied to the usbmsd.add and usbcdrom.add drivers - both of these drivers have default values where if there are no drive quantity parameters then you automatically get 1 USB CDROM, 1 USB Floppy and 1 USB Removable ie:--

BASEDEV=USBCDROM.ADD is treated the same as BASEDEV=USBCDROM.ADD /CDS:1
BASEDEV=USBMSD.ADD is treated the same as BASEDEV=USBMSD.ADD FLOPPIES:1 /REMOVABLES:1


The NIC is on IRQ3 whereas the board reports the USBUHCD devices on IRQ11. I had a lot of trouble getting this board to allocate different irqs to its 3 PCI slots and cut and tried a lot with the location of this card and that in the slots.


Sounds like you may be using some drivers that do not "share" IRQs very well...

I don't think it's a driver issue. I think it's a mainboard issue. I'll be posting something under that heading soon.


How update is my system?
I think it is fairly up-to-date (except for slip-ups). It is a MCP 4.52 with FP5 plus all the other fixes applied as far as I can tell. I can post the Syslevel data here if you like.



The USB base driver/controller is currently at buildlevel 10.158, both the MSD and CDROM are at 10.145.

Also of relevence is the buildlevel of OS2DASD.DMD which should be kept current - I have 14.104 here but it may not be the very latest. 

usbuhcd.sys	10.58
usbohcd.sys	10.123
usbehcd.sys	10.123
usbd.sys	10.117
usbhid.sys	10.97
usmsd.add	10.58
usbcdrom.add	10.145
os2dasd,dmd	14.100



Hope the above is of some help/use.

Too right it helps! I don't think trying to self support an OS/2 system would be possible without people like you around! :-)


Happy New Year

Pete 

Return the good wishes.

Big thanks has been implicit now I say it! If I don't say it, it is because I don't like being "too treacly". :-)

--
To reply by e-mail edit this address to the correct form: vbien at attglobal dot net

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