Computer Rebooting when plugging in USB devices

[voodoo1694]

I have an Adaptec USB/Firewire PCI card in my machine. I have a memory card reader and an external HDD plugged into the USB ports. Almost every time I plug a memory card into the reader, or turn on the external drive, my PC crashes and reboots immediately. Sometimes it crashes, sometimes it's okay. I have to cross my fingers each time... I have no idea what's going on but it's very irritating. If anyone can shed some light on the situation I'd greatly appreciate it -- I've been living with this for a long time and finally decided to ask you guys for help since its driving me nuts.
I'm running WinXP Pro with latest updates.

Thanks!!

 

[jkresh]

does your motherboard have usb ports, if so what happens when you switch some of the items over? Is the hard drive bus powered or does it have its own power adapter? Do you have a usb printer/scanner something that is int storage based that you could test?

 

[voodoo1694]

Thanks for the reply jkresh. My mobo does have USB 1.1 ports that are currently occupied with my printer/mouse. I guess I could try switching the devices over and see if the crashes happen with mobo ports as well. The HDD has it's own power chord that I connect to the wall.
The crashes only happen when plugging in the the devices (or powering up), not when actually using them btw.

 

[jkresh]

definitely try switching the printer/mouse to the card, if it works then try moving one of the storage devices to the motherboard (it will be slow but it will help diagnosis). If the mouse/printer crashes when trying to use the card then the card is faulty, if they work fine and the storage devices work ok on the motherboard then it might be a power issue with the card, if they work fine and the storage devices don't work with the motherboard then it might be an issue with adding any drive letters to your pc.

 

[voodoo1694]

Thanks jkresh I'll give it a shot. Could this possibly be an IRQ conflict? The card worked great for a while, but for the last few months its just been driving me up the wall since I'm always using the card reader for photos. USB 1.1 on the mobo is just sooo painfully slow (yes I have an ancient system in dire need for upgrade)

 

[jkresh]

its possible its an IRQ issue but unlikely unless you changed hardware (or maybe moved the card to a different pci slot?) around the time the problem started.