Can't get USB flash drive to be recognized

[Pinkpuff]

Hi,

I have two different USB flash drives. One is 2 GB and the other is 256 MB. Both are formatted with FAT16. DOSDRIVE does not seem to be able to pick up either of them.

I ran "USBUHCIL" which told me there was another USB controller in operation (which is news to me; I certainly didn't install one) and asked if I wanted to halt its operation in favor of USBUHCIL. I said yes and then ran USBDRIVE.

While USBDRIVE did not report any errors when I ran it, whenever I tried to access any of the "drives" it created, DOS simply responded with "Not ready reading drive" and "current drive is no longer valid>". It did not matter which of the new drive letters I used or which USB slot I used or which flash drive was plugged in.

Am I doing something wrong, missing a step perhaps?

Thanks

[Bret]

I ran "USBUHCIL" which told me there was another USB controller in operation (which is news to me; I certainly didn't install one)

It's probably the BIOS that's causing the problem. There's a quasi-standard for the way the BIOS is supposed to configure the controller vs. the way other (OS) programs are supposed to do it. It's not a standard that comes from the USB organization, it's just something that M$ publishes that says how they expect it to work. Not all of the BIOS manufacturers do it the way Microsoft says they should do it. You can use the /DisableOtherProgram when installing USBUHCIL to bypass that message.

Am I doing something wrong, missing a step perhaps?

Your problem is likely that you have more than one UHCI host controller on your computer. Each UHCI controller can have a maximum of two ports, but on many modern computers some of the ports are never wired out to an external connector so you can actually use them. For example, my latest computer has 6 UHCI controllers (theoretically 12 ports), but only 6 ports appear on the outside of the computer, and one port is internally hooked up to a multimedia card reader. The other five ports are nowhere to be found.

If you just type "USBUHCIL", the host controller it initializes is the first one (Index 0). On your computer, the two ports related to Host Index 0 may not appear on the outside of the computer, or may not even physically exist at all. You'll need to figure out which host controller(s) are associated with which ports, and decide which ones you want to enable. If you want to enable more than one host controller (max 2 ports), you'll need to install more than one instance of USBUHCIL.

Start by running USBHOSTS, which will tell you exactly how many UHCI controllers you have. Then you can try them one at a time to figure out which ports are which:

To initialize the first one (same thing as you're doing now):
USBUHCIL /Index:0

If it doesn't work, uninstall it:
USBUHCIL /Index:0 /Uninstall

Then try the next one:
USBUHCIL /Index:1

etc.

If you have one of the Drives plugged in to a port, after you initialize one of the host controllers, do a USBDEVIC and you will see the disk show up in the list if you have the correct host initialized. Then, you can install USBDRIVE and the disk should start working (after a short delay, usually less than a second).

Bret

[Pinkpuff]

Works like a charm now, thank you so much!

[goodell]

Problem recognizing usb memory stick.

Ok, I'm running a dell c640 in dos.

I couldn't get things to work with the memory stick pluged in.
When I removed the memory stick, ran usbuhci and usbdrive things worked.
Is this normal that you have to set up the usb port without the memory stick plugged in?

Anyway - thanks for a great program.

Roy