Hi guys.

First of all I must apologise in advance if my questions can appear to you as a little bit stupid but I'm quite new to this kind of matters, so please be patient.

In short, recently I bought a NEC (chipset) Cardbus with 2 USB 2.0 ports for PCMCIA, as unfortunately I did damage the only USB 1.0 port of my old acer laptop (I've broken the plastic guide inside the port so that the connection with the external devices is not so easy as before. Crossing the fingers it still works, but I don't for how long).

The Cardbus works correctly when I plug in, for example, my photo camera, which is considered as a MASS STORAGE DEVICE. The files can be read and written on the SD card of the photo camera without any problem.

The problems arise when I try to plug in my Traxdata 128 MB Flash Drive because the same is not detected at all, nor any USB Flash driver is loaded and showed in the Device Manager. Instead the flash drive is immediately detected if I plug it in USB Port 1.0.

At the beginning I thought that traxdata could be fit for only 1.0 USB ports, but both the traxdata drivers cd rom and traxdata website say that this pen drive is a 2.0 USB device, even compatible with 1.0 USB ports.

For your information the following items appear in the Device Manager.

USB Controllers
Hub USB Root
Hub USB Root
Hub USB Root
Open Host Controller ALi from PCI to USB
Open Host Controller NEC PCI USB
Open Host Controller NEC PCI USB

Universal Serial Bus controllers
PCI Class USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controler
USB 2.0 Root Hub Device

When I plug the traxdata flash drive in the laptop USB Port 1.0 the same is immediately detected and the USB Flash Disk drivers appear in the Device Manager as follows:

Hard disk controller
Controller IDE Bus Master PCI M5229 ALi
Master IDE controller (FIFO double)
Slave IDE Controller
USB Flash Disk
USB Flash Disk

To give you more details I quote here below the report issued by AIDA32 about my computer. It goes without saying that The report has been carried out when the traxdata flash drive was connected to the USB PORT 1.0.

Operative system: WIN98SE

[ Hard disk controller / IDE (FIFO double) slave controller secondario ]

Device Properties:
Driver Description IDE slave controller (FIFO double)
Driver Date 05/05/99
Driver Provider Microsoft
INF File MSHDC.INF

Device Resources:
IRQ 15
Port 0170-0177
Port 0376-0376
Port 78C8-78CF

[ Hard disk controller / USB Flash Disk ]

Device Properties:
Driver Description USB Flash Disk
Driver Date 19/06/03
Driver Provider USB Flash Disk
INF File USBOEM01.INF

[ Hard Disk Controller / USB Flash Disk ]

Device Properties:
Driver Description USB Flash Disk
Driver Date 19/06/03
Driver Provider USB Flash Disk
INF File USBOEM01.INF

Motherboard:
CPU Type Mobile Intel Celeron-A, 366 MHz (5.5 x 67)
Motherboard Name Acer TravelMate 510 Series
Motherboard Chipset ALi M1621 ALADDiN-Pro 2
System Memory 64 MB (SDRAM)
BIOS Type Acer (09/06/00)
[______________________________

The following steps have been already tried by the underwriter.

1) I've looked for and installed new drivers for the Nec Cardbus to be used with win98se.

2) I've looked for new drivers for my drive pen but the one already installed were the last version.

Any advise is welcome!!!!

Thanks and regards.

Vespo.

P.S (To be honest I'm starting to think that the NEC Chipset USB 2.0 Cardbus is simply not fit for my traxdata. Unfortunately I do not have another laptop with another OS like XP to check if there the devices work together)