Re: USB 2.x ports not seen by older Mac

In article <200320071658570179%philip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Phil Stripling <philip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My dual 1Gig G4 Mac was made before USB 2 came out and has only 1.1
ports. I bought a card with two external USB 2 ports and just stuck it
into the Mac. I had been told that I needed nothing else, that the Mac
came with drivers and such (I'm now on 10.4.9).

I've connected a 2.x device to one of the ports, and the device doesn't
show up on the desktop. It does appear and is accessible using one of
the 1.1 ports.

What am I missing? Should I have some software with the card for the
Mac to see it?

Just went through some discussion about USB2 and older Macs in
comp.sys.mac.misc a while back.

Anyways, the card is likely OHCI, you plug it in and it works as USB
1.1. If you install drivers (which OS X may do for the card if it finds
it during installation, not updates...), the EHCI part of the card that
supports USB2 gets activated.

So yes, you may need to have a driver installed or you might have to
reinstall OS X so it can find the card during installation and install
the driver for it.

I haven't actually made certain about any of this, it's just information
I've gleaned from researching the subject and wondering if my
USB2/Firewire 400 card will do USB2 if I ever plug a USB2 device into
it...

Greg B.

PS. The subject for where some of this was discussed in
comp.sys.mac.misc is 'Combined USB2 + firewire PCI card for G4' and it
started at 2/11/07...

--
Actual e-mail address is gregbuchner and I'm located at gmail.com
.

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