Hi,

We have an ACER Altos 9100 here, its pretty old and i tried to enable the USB controller to install a USB HD. At the beginning, it wouldnt properly boot and give me an error message stating there's a conflict between the IRQs. I worked some stuff out in the bios to finally get the server to properly boot, but now that i installed Win2000, it states the device as "not working". Reasons are i should upgrade the firmware or the bios. Now i have the latest version of the bios installed, and i couldnt find anything firmware related for the USB controller. Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Eric

If using Win2000, SP3 is needed in order to use USB 2.0. This should provide native support for USB 2.0. If the computer has no USB 2.0, which is likely, the HD may give problems even though USB is supposedly backward compatible. Additionally, USB 1.1 is much slower than 2.0 and if you succeed in getting the drive operational you may be disatisfied with the transfer speeds. You may want to check to see if the latest chipset drivers for your MBoard are running. Also you could consider an add in PCI based USB 2.0 card. Lastly, this message may indicate the controllers in the external drive don't work in USB 1.1 mode. Check the specs of the USB drive.

Thanks for the answer,

I tought it could be related to the drive as well, so i disconnected it to make sure it didnt interfer with the installation of the USB controller. So nothing is connected into the USB port at the moment.

Just a point of reference. USB devices usually install better is the drivers are in place before the device is connected. Sometimes booting with the device after sofware install will trigger windows to see the device, somtimes hot plugging the device works better. Connecting USB devices is perfectly safe to do when the computer is running. Removing the device under Win2000 may trigger a screen message. The proper way to remove an external HD is thru the taskbar device removal. This is so you don't lose any data.