USB Problem? inconsistant recognize media drives on Mitsumi 7-1 media/floppy drive

Looking for some ideas.

I recently built an Athlon based system built on an Abit NF7-S motherboard running Win XP SP2 + updates. The Mitsumi 7-1 combo drive (http://www.mitsumi.com/indexusa.html) looked like a great fit as it is a media card reader + floppy all in one drive. Problem is that upon reboot the system does not always see the media card drives so they do not show up in My Computer or Win Explorer and are not accessable. The system does see the media drive about 10-20% of the time after reboot. The floppy drive component of the device works fine.

It's like the USB is not initializing the device correctly and consistently. I have tried using a different USB port on the motherboard, but not any luck.

If anyone has some ideas on this I would be grateful.

Thanks,
NewEnglandJohn

 

Sounds more like bad/intermittent hardware. I think you may have gotten a card reader that is DOA. Exchange it for another one, at the store you bought it from.

 

I agree, USB has been worked out to the point that it's pretty much guaranteed.

Does the card reader plug into a USB port, or a header on the mainboard? If it plugs into a USB port then I would boot without the card reader attached and try plugging it in once you're into Windows. Sometimes devices act flaky when attached at post

 

Card reader plugs directly into the mainboard. Initiating an RMA process.

Thanks

 

I've had a similar problem with my 7-1 drive. Back in December I built a system based on an Atlon (3200+) and an MSI KBN Neo4 Platinum MoBo. I used the same Mitsumi FA-404 7-in-1 multi-drive for system's FDD. Once all the components were installed, connected, and the Windows XP SP2 Home OS installed, the new system started up fine - great in fact. This was my first build-from-scratch, so I was somewhat (pleasantly) surprised at the lack of problems.
The one notable problem was that although the floopy drive shows up in Windows (A), the other six drives have never been detected by Windows or displayed as a lettered drive.
I just assumed I had done something wrong. There was some comment in the instruction sheet about it being neccessary to install the device driver BEFORE connecting the drive. But since this was a build from scratch, I didn't know how to do that. I didn't have an extra, plain vanilla, floppy drive hanging around, and I far as I knew, I needed to use the FDD first to set up the CD drive so I could install the OS.
I've tried to uninstall and then reinstall the device using device manager, hoping it would load/reload the correct driver. Also tried using the driver download file Mitusmi has on their web site for this FDD. Neither approach worked.
Other than the web site download for the driver, Mitsumi's support for this product seems pretty lame. Had I known this in advance, I may have selected another maker for a similar product. Anyway, this all happened six months ago and I haven't gotten around to finish trouble-shooting this issue, until now. I didn't really consider the (partial) DOA possibility. Do you think I should just RMA it and try another one? Any other ideas? Since this thread ended quite a while ago, is it safe to assume that NewEnglandJohn just got a new one and it worked fine?
Thanks,
- HMS