System freezes

[BeaverBob]

??I had to reformat my c: drive and reinstall everything,
starting with Windows 98 SE. System has an AMD Athalon
CPU with 128 MB ram. I had a number of different
peripherals installed, and Windows has difficulty
recognizing them. After several attempts, I decided to
remove the PCI cards. After Windows installed and got
the basic motherboard resources configured, I started
adding the PCI cards back one at a time. Windows was
able to deal with that.

The USB controllers are on the motherboard, so as best
I can tell, they configured okay. My problem is that
when I plug a USB device in, my system freezes up.
Both the mouse and keyboard fail to respond, so the
only thing I can do is a hardware reset. The system
freezes up when I attach the USB device before boot-up.
It also freezes up when I attach the USB device when
the system is already running. The device drivers for
the USB device were installed before attempting to
physically attach the device. My first inclination was
that this is an interrupt conflict problem, but there’s
no way to see what’s going on after I attach the
device.

There are a number of IRQ’s which are
shared–9,10,1,14,15. The USB controllers are
“attached” to IRQ9 along with the modem and ACPI IRQ
Holder for PCI IRQ Steering.

Any suggestions as to how I might fix the problem?

 

[micker377]

Go into device manager in safe mode. Remove the all the USB devices listed (bottom of list), reboot to normal mode and everything should be OK. While you're in safe mode/device manager, look at the other items listed - it's amazing how many "ghost" drivers are there!

 

[BeaverBob]

?I tried going to Safe Mode and removing all references
to USB devices as you suggested. That didn’t change
anything. Windows “found new device” when I rebooted,
but when I plugged in the device, system froze as
before.

Tried reinstalling the driver. Also downloaded an
updated driver from vendor’s website. Neither of these
solved the problem.

Went back and checked the motherboard manual where it
shows the defaults for the BIOS settings. Checked
these against the actual BIOS settings. What I found
was that the actual settings had MPU-401 Disabled;
manual said it should be Enabled. Changed the setting
to “Enabled”. After that, the system no longer freezes
up. The USB device is properly recognized.

What I don’t understand is why the MPU-401 setting
should have anything to do with the problem I was
having.

 

[micker377]

USB can be a mystery. My motherboard has 4 ports accessable + one on the motherboard for a card reader. When you hook up the card reader, #4 USB port is dis-abled. Took me days to figure out why my USB printer was intermittant!