Fri, 25 Feb 2005

USB problem solved

Back in August, I wrote about problems I was having with a USB mouse. Since then, I’ve identified issues with any USB devices I’ve tried in that box. Recently, I installed FreeBSD-5.3 on another similar box and—on a whim—decided to try the “problem” mouse, and it just worked. Subsequently, I tried some other USB devices in that box and they also just worked. So I formed a tentative hypothesis that the USB support on FreeBSD-4.10 was less reliable than under 5.3.

A couple of days back, this was put to the test as I began building my new workstation, based on the motherboard discussed above. To get it running, I stole the FreeBSD boot disk from the machine where the USB stuff worked, confidently expecting success. Initially, the mouse appeared to work, but various things went wrong once I accessed the SCSI controller. This was followed by many frustrating hours over the next day and a half where I tried many combinations of hardware and BIOS settings, all to no avail.

I was also busily boring the #humbug IRC channel with my whining and eventually the suggestion was made that I should try upgrading the BIOS. This had not occurred to me at all, as the working motherboard was a slightly older version of the same thing with a slightly older BIOS—however, I finally took the plunge and upgraded the BIOS and was immediately rewarded with a working system. Why Asus had to break their BIOS on a later board is unclear to me, but the whole experience reminded me how much I hate PC hardware and everything connected with it.

At least I can now get on with my grandiose scheme of setting the machine up so that all the real things I was planning can start to get done.

Posted at: 20:49

Path: /technology   |  permalink