[William_Wilson]

It has come to my attention (being home for christmas) that my mom's computer seems to have some issues reading usb/flash drives. Any kind including: sandisk, DIC thumbdrive, and an unknown company, nothing works properly.

The Problem:
When the drive is connected to any usb port, front or back it is detected and activated for use, but the files display as:
○m▄☺☺☺☺ and other similar things. They are not readable as their types nor are most of them deletable. The drives all work fine in my laptop, home desktop and my dad's work computer, but not here, even files placed on to a freshly formatted drive (from this messed computer) may not be readable later on in the day.

Hardware:
This computer is running an ASRock K7S41GX mobo (Socket A)
AMD Athalon 2000+ CPU
256MB DDR 333 RAM
40GB Maxtor HDD (let's not focus on this part)


I have tried everything i can think of, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, this computer has dial up (and crappy dial up at that) so the fewer files i need to download the better

*This is really pissing me off, i have solved countless similar issues, but this one escapes me!

[Villish Gool]

What year was the computer created and what operating system is the machine running?

[born2c0de]

Which OS is your mom using?
If its running on your machine, then looks like an OS issue.

Did you try them on another OS on your mom's PC ? (Assuming you have more than one OS)

[Jayman]

This link might help you troubleshoot the problem. I am assuming XP is the version your mother is running.

Since the problem seems to affect all types of USB drives I would suggest following the instructions at the bottom of the link I provided and uninstall the USB controllers and then reinstall them fresh.

[William_Wilson]

Sorry, completely forgot about the OS: it's XP Home, and the drives all work with XP Pro 2000, and win98.

Also other usb devices work, such as my dad's digital camera and their printer.

It's been a busy few days and this just added to the frustration, lol.

I am about to uninstall/re-install the controllers as well as try with and without the updates to drivers, will post again on the outcome.

[William_Wilson]

I finished the suggested, to no avail.

If i attempt to install the usb 2.0 driver from the cd i now get an error:

Quote

SiS USB 2.0 Host Controller is not available or function disabled

SP1 and most of SP2 is installed, so i am running out of ideas and sanity.

[Jayman]

You may need to re-enable the USB in the BIOS after uninstalling it.

Here are some of the default settings for the BIOS.

You may also want to check out this Registry update for the SIS USB 2.0 found here.

[cipherence]

yea, you have to engage the USB drives in the BIOS after startup, they can be shutdown after like a power surge, someone dumbtrying to short out the USB port or something like that.