Weird USB Problems...

O.K.

My uncle wanted me to setup a scanner (Visioneer 5800 OneTouch USB) he bought last week. And I thought this was going to be a piece of cake...was I wrong....

After the first reboot after software install, the scanner is recognized. But when you shutdown and power back up. The scanner is seen as an "Unkown Device" under "USB Controllers" in Device Manager. If I unplug it, delete the "Unkown Device" and plug it back in, it's still seen as "Unkown Device". The only way to have the computer see the scanner is to leave the scanner unplugged, reboot, then plug the scanner in once Windows has been loaded. If the scanner is plugged in during a reboot or shutdown, it will be seen as an "Unkown Device" by the computer. There was a USB camera plugged in before all this and it was working fine and now I'm having the same "Unkown Device" problem with the camera.

The computer is a Compaq Presario 7478. The computer has not given my uncle any problems until I attempted to install the scanner.

Any help would be appreciated....

I had this with my usb webcam... drove me nuts.

What I eventually did was unplug it all, go into safemode, uninstall the drivers and software, go through the registry (having backed it up) and deleted anything to do with the camera.... then I went and got the updated driver and installed it using the scanner and camera wizard... then I installed the software... phew!!

I also set a system restore point when I got rid of the old camera drivers just in case I needed to roll back again...

With my webcam its install drivers, then plug in camera when prompted.... if the camera was plugged in before the prompt it screwed up.

Sometimes that doesn't even work. For a couple of years Earthlink was giving away Alaris Weecams (a USB webcam) to new subscribers. That's when I started getting several calls from people having this exact same problem. It turns out the ininial version of the camera had a design flaw and exhibited this behavior when paired with AMD processors (this came straight from Alaris). The company finally came up with a fix and allowed owners of the older revision cameras to send them in to be reworked or replaced.

oddly enough, the compaq uses an AMD processor. but things just got a bit weirder today. i was working on the computer and all of a sudden the ps/2 mouse port doesn't work anymore. i've gone as far as to install the windows 98 all over again to see if the problem was XP. but it seems that it isnt.

it's using a WD harddrive, so i downloaded its diagnostic program and am going to check and see if there is a problem with the harddrive. and the ps/2 mouse only worked the first time i installed 98. when i rebooted, i could only use the mouse in the usb port along with my usb 3com nic card.

i have all week to work on it, but it seems that won't be enough time....

update -

i tried to reinstall windows xp and i got an error when windows is in the first steps of installation. after it asks for the directory that the files are stored in, i receive an error. i don't remember it word for word but it says something like "windows was not able to install boot loader, hard disk may be damaged"

i thought the drive was a wd and when i ran the wd diagnostics it said that it couldn't find a drive. i'm going to look for an old harddrive and swap it out and see if the same things happens again.

does anyone know of a good program that can do a thorough scan of a harddrive and tell if it's going or is bad.

thanks.

do you now what an fdisk is....
next time you load up get an old dos 6.22 boot disk http://www.bootdisk.com/...
put disk in floppy and reboot...
when at the command prompt type <c:\>
then <fdisk /mbr>
then format c: /q /s
then reboot with the winxp cdrom no boot disk
see if you get the errors again

yes...fdisk was one of the first things i tried. i've fdisk and formatted and all those good things to no avail. error still pops up.

PowerMax utility from www.maxtor.com has worked well on other makes of hard disk... or if you have to retrieve data invest in spinrite5 from www.grc.com (awesome proggie, but takes 36 hours to clean up a 10 gig drive!)

Just a thought, you said fdisk, did you fdisk /mbr ? Or run the repair console from the cd and type in fixboot?

i havent tried fdisk /mbr....

i'll give that a shot when i start working on it again. i hope it works....

fdisk /mbr didn't help at all. i've traced it back to the USB and PS/2 mouse ports. for some odd reason, when i unplug the ports the installations go well. but as soon as i plug anything back into any of the ports, the installations become filled with problems. i think it's the motherboard, but we all know how weird problems can manisfest themselves, so i'm not ruling out anything right now.

Have you been to compaq and looked for bios upgrades and other patches?

There are two bios revisions both mention usb improvements.

yeah. for some odd reason i get the "bad command interpreter" error when i boot of the softpaq disk. maybe its because im extracting it on the compaq machine. i'll download it to another machine and extract it there....hope it works....