Bah!

[kerravonsen]

Yesterday I bought myself a nice 120G external USB drive, which I set up and formatted and stuff on my laptop, and it worked nicely.

I've just spent... almost 5 hours trying to get it to work properly on my desktop, only to come to the conclusion that it is only semi-working (when it works, it is very slow) because all the USB ports on my desktop are USB 1.1 even though one of them is supposed to be USB 2.0.

This means I'm going to have to get myself a USB 2.0 card -- but I've run out of slots.
This means I'm going to have to get rid of one of the three cards that are taking up the slots.
Not gonna get rid of the SCSI card, that has three devices hanging off it (including my scanner, old but faithful HP Scanjet 5p)
Which boils the choice down to
(a) the extra network card, which I could probably lose, since I no longer need two network cards since I changed the configuration of the network
(b) the extra parallel port card, which is used by my laser printer. Now, the laser printer can theoretically also use USB, but the last time I tried to get that working, it didn't.
(sigh)

Guess it will be the network card.
But I should get a long USB cable also, just in case.

(sigh)

It is hot. I think I'll go lie down or something.

Comments

[bktheirregular]

Might be worth checking BIOS settings - there might be a switch in the BIOS flipped the wrong way, telling the computer to think of the motherboard's USB ports as 1.1. I know on my machine's BIOS, that setting's there.

[kerravonsen]

No, I don't think it's that; when I do lspci, one of the USB cards is listed as USB 2.0, but it still gives the same error as the others; and that error, it seems, occurs when a USB 2.0 device is plugged into a USB 1.1 port.

There may be other things I can do, but after spending 5 hours on it, I think it will just be simpler to get a new card. Monday.