USB Quirkiness on a Quicksilver

[Emehr]

The machine:

- Quicksilver 2002 Dual 1GHz w/GeForce4 MX

- 1 hard drive boots 9.2.2 or Tiger

- 1 hard drive boots Leopard

The accessories:

- 4-port USB 2.0 card

- iogear USB hub (uses two USB ports, provides three USB ports and various card reader slots)

- Apple ADC monitor (which is what I usually plug my keyboard and Wacom tablet into)

- Logitech wireless mouse receiver plugged into an Apple "chiclet" keyboard

The problem:

Sometimes one or more of my USB sources (back of monitor, native Quicksilver slots, or 4-port card slots) will stop working.

Here's the typical scenario: After booting into Tiger, the USB ports behind the monitor will stop working so I have to remove the keyboard and tablet and plug them into the iogear hub (which is either plugged into the native USB slots or the 4-port USB card slots). The mouse works during the boot process after the cursor is first available. It's at the point near the end of the startup process when the ports stop working.

Before I delve too deeply into the troubleshooting process, I wanted to see if anybody has ever had any similar issues. I'm inclined to blame the 4-port USB card because this didn't happen before I installed it, but why would it affect the USB signal that goes through the ADC port that feeds the monitor? Or is this a typical problem with ports supplied through ADC?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Emehr]

Update: It seems to happen only when booting into Tiger. Another problem that crops up when this happens is I have to restart using the hard key on the front of the Mac since the Log Out and Restart menu commands are non-responsive. I'll probably just reinstall Tiger at this point to see if that does the trick.

 

[Gorgonops]

Out of curiosity, have you tried pulling the add-on card?

 

[Emehr]

Yeah, I pulled it for a short while and everything seemed fine. However, I was needing to back up a couple USB drives and the USB 1.0 speeds were pretty excruciating so I put it back in.

I went ahead and reinstalled Tiger on the dual-boot drive this morning and so far everything is working (with the USB 2.0 card still plugged in). I think I'll need to go through a few cycles of switching start-up disks and rebooting before I know for sure if my previous Tiger install got corrupted or something. (I was getting disk errors in 9.2.2 which coincided with the USB problems, maybe not related but who knows?)