Internal card reader messes up external usb ports

H

Highlander

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I have a Asus motherboard P5KPL AM SE which as 4 USB ports at the back and 2 in the front. The back four are hard wired onto the board and the 2 in the front are connected via a cable to a USB connector on the mother board.

At the back I've got the keyboard and mouse, webcam and a 4 port powered USB hub connecting printer and a y-cable to an external HDD. The front ports I usually use for a media player - basically another HDD.

There is one spare USB connector on the board. So I bought an internal card reader and connected it. Powered up and working great, but the front USB ports and the back ones not working properly. There is activity on the external drives, but don't register in My Computer, and the webcam sometimes shows an error in device manager.

When I disconnect the card reader, all works perfectly.

I tried removing all the drivers and reinstalling, but then the USB ports worked and not the card reader.

I suspect its either a motherboard flaw / defect / problem or a power problem, but I cant imaging the card reader drawing that much power - or more than 2 HDD's. Or its a problem with the card reader itself.

Any ideas?
 
Help anyone

Ok, I'm not trying to be funny, but this is the first time I've never had any response on the forum, not that I'm a regular or anything, but I was hoping for at least some direction? Nothing?
 
Let me guess, its a Sahara card reader right? They are prone to go bad. Low quality to start with. I have had this experience with 3 of these internal card readers. Dump it and get a decent one.
 
I'd go with the S-GND fix proposed by werner, makes sense. If it does work, get that s-gnd wire to touch chassis when finishing up. You might want to dump the extra current somewhere incase the need arises.
 
Awesome, thanks for the info. Will start snipping away tonight. Nothing to lose, after all its useless right now. Will make sure to earth the loose wire as well, rather that than what? Fry the board?
 
Highlander said:
Awesome, thanks for the info. Will start snipping away tonight. Nothing to lose, after all its useless right now. Will make sure to earth the loose wire as well, rather that than what? Fry the board?
Click to expand...

Don't rush to snip though, try removing it with a screw driver etc. For all you know, could be similar symptoms but faulty card reader. Always be careful when voiding warranty ;)
 
I've had this before as well, but with a USB PCI card (can't remember the brand). As soon as I connected it to the PC, none of the devices connected to the onboard USB ports worked, only those on the PCI card. Motherboard is also ASUS AFAIK. After a while, trying different IRQ & base memory settings, I decited it's easier to get a USB hub. Problem solved. So, I guess it could be an IRQ or base memory conflict.
 
And here I was being so hopeful... why can't things just be simple. I removed the 9th connector - and in this case it was blue - all of them had different colours, but definitely the right one as it was on its own, next to an empty socket. Booted up and it took ages, literally about 10 minutes, but did boot eventually and after a little bit of hassle, seemed ok, i.e. I could access my external drive connected via the powered USB hub.

I assumed the long boot up time was due to the card reader and perhaps installing the drivers, so shut down and rebooted, but still the same 10 minutes. So plugged the blue wire back in (thanks UnUnOctium for the tip), and boot up was super fast again, but same problem.

So back at square one. Whats next? Return it and get an external one?
 
the bios took ages - found the primary HDD and DVD quickly, and spend ages looking for USB devices, then got to the windows startup screen and sat there for equally as long. I'll spend a couple more days doing some research, but as you say, shouldnt have this type of hassle, so I'll probably end up returning it and either trying a different internal card reader or an external one. Thanks anyway for the help
 
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