USB 2.0 pen drive crashing XP

Hi,

I've just bought myself a ByteStor 256Mb USB2.0 pen drive, which is starting to drive me crazy! I use it on 3 machines (work, home and college) and its fine on the work (Compaq Evo - Win XP SP1) and college (Elonex - Win2K) boxes, but constantly crashes my home PC. The box is home built - Abit KT7A v1.3 mobo, GeForce FX5200 graphics, Ali USB 2.0 pci card, Win XP SP1, - and each time I try and stop the device to remove it I get a quick BSOD, then the PC reboots. If I try and eject the device, same thing. If I leave it connected for a while, same thing again after a random amount of time.

I've tried all the latest drivers I can think of (except flashing the BIOS - thats to be done this weekend), checked all patches I can think of, including getting the USB 1.1 & 2.0 patch from M$. Nothing seems to help.

I've contacted ByteStor tech support (4 days ago) but I haven't had a response yet. I really don't don't want to send the drive back as it was a great price (cheapskate, I know), and I use ByteStor CF cards in a number of devices and they've always been great. Anyone any ideas what I can do to try and resolve this?

If you are plugging it into the ALI usb 2 card, it may be the card is not supplying the right voltage, or even the psu in your computer is not supplying the right voltage to the motherboard. In order for you to read the BSOD and post it here, right click my computer, properties, advanced tab, startup and recovery button, uncheck automatically restart...Then when it Bsods, it stays like that till you manually restart the computer.

As I said, if you would post the entire message here, we can help further.

Sorry for the late reply and Welcome to Windrivers!

Thanks for the advice NooNoo. I'm also getting the same results when I use the USB 1 ports, so I guess the power supply could be the culprit. I'll get the STOP message and post it here later.

Thanks for your help so far....!

OK, the STOP error I'm getting is:
BAD_POOL_CALLER
STOP:0x000000C2(0x00000007,0x00000CD4,0x020c0003,0 x8928D1E0)
A quick google shows this as a kernel mode process or driver performing a memory operation, typically due to faulty driver or software...?
Not sure where this leaves me. Any ideas would be much appreciated!

Leaves you with an interesting set of possibilities, the first being that your motherboard drivers are not correctly installed. This ALI card, are you just using that or do you get this crash on every usb port, 1.1 or 2?

Edit: hmmm ms says it may be as simple as your AV

I used to get crashes with powered USB devices (like my scanner, bluetooth, etc) until I made use of a powered hub.

For all one will cost you (about £10-£15) it would be worthwhile, especially since you could connect even more devices without your PC moaning.

Drivers might be a problem too, but my money is on your board not being able to supply sufficient power to the devices connected to it.

I had a problem last year with my pen drive locking up as soon as I plugged it into the port. I tired everything you can think of. I had went to best buy and tried 3 different ram chips, seperate usb card, reinstalling drivers, reformatting, taking all cards out except for video card, disabling everying on mobo, power supplies, harddrives. Come to find out the problem was the CPU. I know that may be strange and could be a first but after changing to the a new CPU, I didnt have anymore problems.

NooNoo - thanks for your suggestions. I get crashes on all the USB ports, not just on the Ali card. *I think* that the mobo drivers are installed OK, and I've got the latest from the Abit site, but I'll see if I can find out any issues. I still haven't had a chance to flash the BIOS yet, but there is no mention of this fixing any USB issues.

ringo2143z - does a pen drive need a large amount of power? I don't have a huge number of USB devices (printer, scanner, card reader, PDA cradle and occasionaly a NetMD walkman). I'll try fiddling about with connecting / disconnecting these and see what happens. I have a 420w PSU in the case, supplying 2 HDD, DVD rom and CD-RW. Nothing else is fed via this PSU.

Rockafella - thats what I was hoping not to hear! If I have to upgrade CPU, mobo, and RAM to use a £40 pen drive I will not be happy!

Thanks again guys. I'll let you know what happens next...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Leaves you with an interesting set of possibilities, the first being that your motherboard drivers are not correctly installed. This ALI card, are you just using that or do you get this crash on every usb port, 1.1 or 2?

Edit: hmmm ms says it may be as simple as your AV

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Is this 'Physic Tech Aura' in reverse ? :D ... he got straight to his own issue .. though I think you 'have it' on the 'not correctly installed' line - I'm guessing its acpi issues & 'allocation' ...

Quote:

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A quick google shows this as a kernel mode process or driver performing a memory operation, typically due to faulty driver or software...?

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Uncle Billy tells you how to 'debug' it (which if you can get it working ought to reveal what's 'bad' ) - but methinks a 'slot shuffle' might cure it (so try the pci usb card in a different slot), as ...

Quote:

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The current thread is making a bad pool request. Typically this is at a bad IRQL level or double freeing the same allocation, etc

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Go get that bios update too (my reading is that it 'can' affect irq assignment - & this ain't a motherboard 'designed for xp' so acpi & resource allocation may be 'tricky' ;))

Well, tried flashing the BIOS- no joy... Grrr!!!

Next stage is to try a slot shuffle at the weekend, and as I've got a pretty good drive image I think I'll combine that with a rebuild, and disconnect everything thats not critical and see what happens then...

I've also got a replacement drive coming from the supplier, but I suspect that I'll have the same results with that.

Just a note on 'designed for xp' (it mighn't be this ... but I 'suspect it' sooooo much ...)

'designed for xp' for a motherboard means in 'full nerd' - PCI 2.1 compliant & ACPI 2.0 capable - so huh ? whats that mean in 'english' ?

It means that the phrase 'plug & play' should allways have been what I said it really meant 'plug & PRAY !', Billy Boy has now cottoned on, & stuff gets 'tested' for compliance. PCI 2.1 is the 'sharing standard' (which means that 'share capable devices' identify themselves with their 'sharing possibilities' & 'not possibles' as opposed to 'before' which only required the 'possibles' ) ACPI 2.0 is an 'improved sharing mechanism' (I know it means advanced computer power interface - but it does the 'resource allocation' in bios too) which uses the 'not possibles' to figure out a better 'answer' than acpi 1.0 could which needed 'tweaking' quite often (that's the reason why 98 has an IRQ re-mapping utility for various chipsets) by either patches or windows itself 'trying to re-arbitrate' ...

At the end of all this you just mighn't get it to work with xp ... which was of course why you wanted the phrase 'designed for xp' in the first place ;)

I agree with what you say about the drive being 'ok' - it works in two other machines 'fine' ... so still 'your beast' at fault from where I'm stood & your position too, methinks ...

:confused:

Well, finally got to the bottom of it. The culprit was my AV software! I use(d - past tense now) eTrust from CA. Seems the real time monitoring didn't like it when the drive was unmounted, which is strange as it was fine with my card reader (go figure...). Anyway, an email to eTrust support only resulted in a standard, irrelevant "try this, then try that" message, so I am now a Norton AV customer. ByteStor's support department were stumped, but I guess I can't really blame them for that.

I won't give a blow by blow account of how I proved this to be the problem, but I think I went through every hardware / software combination that I could (bye bye a whole weekend, and then some) until I nailed it. I suppose sometimes you just gotta try everything, no matter how unlikely...

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone.

Ah....

I had this exact same problem, with the same Abit KT7a Raid motherboard, last year, in my case I found, buy trial and error, that it was a Creative SoundBaster Live update, that was the cause of all my problems.

Unfortunately, I've now got the same problem again ! However, this time, even removing all Creative drivers has not cured my Pen Drive problems.

Interestingly I have a 3Gb USB hard drive and that still works fine !

Anoying isn't it !*$**!

Any suggestions, before I spend the rest of Easter on this, much appreciated.

Regards, Dave

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DodgyDave

Ah....

I had this exact same problem, with the same Abit KT7a Raid motherboard, last year, in my case I found, buy trial and error, that it was a Creative SoundBaster Live update, that was the cause of all my problems.

Unfortunately, I've now got the same problem again ! However, this time, even removing all Creative drivers has not cured my Pen Drive problems.

Interestingly I have a 3Gb USB hard drive and that still works fine !

Anoying isn't it !*$**!

Any suggestions, before I spend the rest of Easter on this, much appreciated.

Regards, Dave

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So welcome then Dodgy Dave :D

Right you seem pretty convinced its some remnant of a creative install, & I'm not gonna initially try to disuade you from that, creative driver uninstall is just that .. 'creative' & does leave 'orphan' processes like devldr32.exe & other spurious stuff that never even wanted installing in the first place, never mind if the card is gone (or ought to be as far as windows knows) :rolleyes:

There's a number of 'cleaner tools' (being one I've used previously, though generally I do it the 'hard way' by hand).. give this a whirl having uninstalled the card 'properly' first & see if your theory holds water ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by richardw

:confused:

Well, finally got to the bottom of it. The culprit was my AV software! I use(d - past tense now) eTrust from CA. Seems the real time monitoring didn't like it when the drive was unmounted, which is strange as it was fine with my card reader (go figure...). Anyway, an email to eTrust support only resulted in a standard, irrelevant "try this, then try that" message, so I am now a Norton AV customer. ByteStor's support department were stumped, but I guess I can't really blame them for that.

I won't give a blow by blow account of how I proved this to be the problem, but I think I went through every hardware / software combination that I could (bye bye a whole weekend, and then some) until I nailed it. I suppose sometimes you just gotta try everything, no matter how unlikely...

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone.

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Sometimes it comes down to that. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about 440bx chipsets and win2k hal doing 16 separate installs.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DodgyDave

Ah....

I had this exact same problem, with the same Abit KT7a Raid motherboard, last year, in my case I found, buy trial and error, that it was a Creative SoundBaster Live update, that was the cause of all my problems.

Unfortunately, I've now got the same problem again ! However, this time, even removing all Creative drivers has not cured my Pen Drive problems.

Interestingly I have a 3Gb USB hard drive and that still works fine !

Anoying isn't it !*$**!

Any suggestions, before I spend the rest of Easter on this, much appreciated.

Regards, Dave

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Adding to Confus=ed suggestion, if this is xp or 2k, does is show up in disk management or device manager as an unknown or splatted device?

Had the same problem on 2 home PC's (One W2K, one WIN XP). Tracked the problem down to my AV software which was CA E-Trust v6.1. Upgraded E-Trust to V7.0 and hey presto, all now working fine on both machines. Simple when you now how!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by richardw

Hi,

I've just bought myself a ByteStor 256Mb USB2.0 pen drive, which is starting to drive me crazy! I use it on 3 machines (work, home and college) and its fine on the work (Compaq Evo - Win XP SP1) and college (Elonex - Win2K) boxes, but constantly crashes my home PC. The box is home built - Abit KT7A v1.3 mobo, GeForce FX5200 graphics, Ali USB 2.0 pci card, Win XP SP1, - and each time I try and stop the device to remove it I get a quick BSOD, then the PC reboots. If I try and eject the device, same thing. If I leave it connected for a while, same thing again after a random amount of time.

I've tried all the latest drivers I can think of (except flashing the BIOS - thats to be done this weekend), checked all patches I can think of, including getting the USB 1.1 & 2.0 patch from M$. Nothing seems to help.

I've contacted ByteStor tech support (4 days ago) but I haven't had a response yet. I really don't don't want to send the drive back as it was a great price (cheapskate, I know), and I use ByteStor CF cards in a number of devices and they've always been great. Anyone any ideas what I can do to try and resolve this?

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