Installation of no-name multi-port ALI USB 2.0 / IEEE1394 pci card

H

Hans H jakobsen

I recently bought a multi-port USB / Firewire card. The card is a no name
card. The chip is an ALI USB 2.0 / IEEE1394. The card did not come with any
manual; only a driver CD with one driver installation file. The card is
apparently not P&P and this is where my troubles start. After a problem free
installation of the ALI USB driver form the driver CD, I cannot see the new
USB / Firewire ports when I look in the device manager. When I run "check
for new" hardware WinXP is not able to detect the new card. The computer is
an ASAU A7N266-VM motherboard with a AMD 1800, a 60mb Diamond hd, 512 mb of
memory of which 32 is allocated to the onboard NVIDA graphic adapter.



Does anyone have any idea of where or what I am doing wrong? Or can someone
direct my to a site or newsgroup that address this kind of problems?



Any suggestions will be highly appreciated



Sincerely,



Hans
 
G

Guest

Hi

Have you installed SP1 or SP1a

Pete


----- Hans H jakobsen wrote: ----

I recently bought a multi-port USB / Firewire card. The card is a no nam
card. The chip is an ALI USB 2.0 / IEEE1394. The card did not come with an
manual; only a driver CD with one driver installation file. The card i
apparently not P&P and this is where my troubles start. After a problem fre
installation of the ALI USB driver form the driver CD, I cannot see the ne
USB / Firewire ports when I look in the device manager. When I run "chec
for new" hardware WinXP is not able to detect the new card. The computer i
an ASAU A7N266-VM motherboard with a AMD 1800, a 60mb Diamond hd, 512 mb o
memory of which 32 is allocated to the onboard NVIDA graphic adapter



Does anyone have any idea of where or what I am doing wrong? Or can someon
direct my to a site or newsgroup that address this kind of problems



Any suggestions will be highly appreciate



Sincerely



Han
 
J

Jim Macklin

Where did you buy it and how much did you save by buying a
"no name" item? Will they take it back?


| I recently bought a multi-port USB / Firewire card. The
card is a no name
| card. The chip is an ALI USB 2.0 / IEEE1394. The card did
not come with any
| manual; only a driver CD with one driver installation
file. The card is
| apparently not P&P and this is where my troubles start.
After a problem free
| installation of the ALI USB driver form the driver CD, I
cannot see the new
| USB / Firewire ports when I look in the device manager.
When I run "check
| for new" hardware WinXP is not able to detect the new
card. The computer is
| an ASAU A7N266-VM motherboard with a AMD 1800, a 60mb
Diamond hd, 512 mb of
| memory of which 32 is allocated to the onboard NVIDA
graphic adapter.
|
|
|
| Does anyone have any idea of where or what I am doing
wrong? Or can someone
| direct my to a site or newsgroup that address this kind of
problems?
|
|
|
| Any suggestions will be highly appreciated
|
|
|
| Sincerely,
|
|
|
| Hans
|
|
 
M

Mike Paul

Hans H jakobsen said:
Does anyone have any idea of where or what I am doing wrong? Or can someone
direct my to a site or newsgroup that address this kind of problems?

I've struggled for a few weeks to get USB2.0 performance out of the
card, and now that my USB2.0 hard disk enclosure caused a disk failure
I'm not so worried about fixing that issue for a while. However, I
can give some advice on what got the card working and what stopped it
again.

My Asus P3V4X shares IRQs in an odd way. Some slots (1 & 2) claim to
not share IRQs with another slot but do with the graphics card, while
there are pairs of slots (3 & 6, 4 & 5) that share. The Ali card
wants 3 IRQs, and in practice that means all the sharing rules are
tossed out the door.

Slot 5 is the only slot I can use that works acceptably to get the
INTERNAL USB device to register as USB2.0. The other 4 USB ports make
no claim to high speed, but they all are forced to share IRQ 11 with
my graphics card so that may be hurting them. Nowhere in the P3V4X
manual does it say slot 5 will share even 1 IRQ with the graphics
card. Slot 4, the slot that 5 would share with, is where I have my
slot fan. I had the card in slot 6 last night (shares with my DVC2
capture card in slot 3) to debug problems with a gigabit NIC I was
installing, and *all* I mean ALL of the USB ports and the Firewire
port disappeared from the system. It was trying to use IRQ 7 for the
4 USBs and failed miserably. Once I was finished debugging (no Cat 5
cable is allowed to touch a gigabit NIC so look before you upgrade an
existing system) I put the cards back and everything started working
again. The gigabit NIC is functioning acceptably in slot 6 but I hope
the only-slightly-better-than-100Mbps performance isn't IRQ related or
I'm sunk.

So I'd remove every non-essential card from your machine, and try each
open slot to see what happens. If you can only assign IRQs to the
slots via the BIOS, that might help but I found that the assigned IRQ
went only to the internal USB and the other IRQs keep coming up shared
exactly as before. Once you get the card working right, you'll have
to add back the removed cards individually and check to see if
anything breaks after the next startup.

The internal USB2.0 is being shared by a hub I installed in a 5-1/4"
slot and a 8-in-1 media reader in a 3-1/2" slot. I have a small
USB2.0 hub inside the box doing the sharing. The internal and
external hubs are listed as 2.0 under the USB device removal but all I
get is 1.1 performance.

I'm planning on a 4Ghz P4 next year, and that machine won't need this
card because just about all new machines have USB2.0 and Firewire (and
some even gigabit ethernet) on the motherboard, but I'm going to limp
along until then and maybe you can too...
 

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