devices. anybody report problems? i've encountered failures with usb thumb drives and now, external usb/firewire hd's. by failure i mean, vista won't recognize the device, ultimately. either through driver-insstall failure or some OS level of device inaccessibility.

3/9/2008 9:17:34 PM

sounds like a problem with your usb controller or the EHCI drivers.

3/9/2008 9:18:41 PM

yeah, device manager says they're all running fine. driver updates say they're all current. firmware is up to date.

3/9/2008 9:21:12 PM

^that doesn't mean they're not broken.

do all other USB devices work ok? is it just mass-storage-type devices?

3/9/2008 11:36:02 PM

I'm terrible at troubleshooting, so forgive me if I say something that seems like nonsense to an experienced person, but I just got done fixing/stumbling through a similar problem (vista devices randomly failing to work).

I had a network adapter device (6TO4 Adapter, I think) fail on me earlier today, which I'm pretty certain was what kept me from connecting to the internet (having the "help" function search the internet for information regarding a failed network adapter was brilliant, by the way, Microsoft). I found something that seemed to help diagnose the problem, though, but it might just end up telling you what you already know.

Was in control panel (classic view) > Performance information and tools > "Advanced tools" under the left-hand "tasks" menu > "Generate a system health report".

Again, this might just tell you something you already know, but it helped me figure out exactly what device was failing and gave a vague clue on how to fix it. It recommended I reinstall it using Device Manager. The device manager did mark the device that was failing, but for whatever reason only did so after running the system health report... Maybe this helps you, maybe not, I hope it does.


Irrelevant to your problem, but the conclusion to mine, in case anyone was wondering: Not entirely on purpose, I ended up simply uninstalling the particular 6TO4 Adapter entirely, and then restarting [something relevant, I don't recall] through Network and sharing center. After that everything functioned fine.

I have now demonstrated to tech talk that I have absolutely no knowledge of how to troubleshoot problems in Windows Vista. Please to not have verbal abuse.

3/10/2008 4:20:48 AM