[Millennium]

I'm on a Beige G3 running 10.2.6. I'd been using a USB card in this thing for well over a year, when suddenly it just stopped working. No USB devices plugged into this card are even recognized by the system as existing.

I went into the Apple System Profiler, and it said "No USB Devices Found" under the USB section of Devices and Volumes. Fair enough, but it didn't even recognize that there was any card in the slot where my USB card was kept.

I have three cards in my machine: a FireWire card (A1), a USB card (C1 initially), and a 3dfx Voodoo4 that sits around collecting dust for the most part (B1). Note that although OSX doesn't support the 3Dfx card, it does recognize that there's a card in that slot, it's a display card, and that it's a Voodoo4; it just won't do anything with it. So I figured that perhaps the slot was bad. I opened up the machine, did a CUDA reset, and switched the USB and 3dfx cards.

When I went back into the Apple System Profiler, I was surprised to find that the machine now recognized C1 and not B1: in other words, it found the 3Dfx card in its new slot, but was now failing to recognize the USB card in the 3dfx card's previous home.

OK, so now I was really confused. I figured that since I'd basically gotten the card at Cap'n Cheapo's Discount House O' USB, I'd get another card. This time I went for the CompUSA 4-port card, which they claim is OSX-compatible. I switched out the old card for the new one. Still no luck; OSX doesn't even recognize that a card is there.

This is getting annoying. Is it possible that there is a driver problem of some kind? What else could I do to try and get this card working? It's annoying, because my printer is hooked up to this card (I can hook the printer up to other machines -Mac and PC alike- and it works fine, so there is nothing wrong with the printer), but I want to use the Beige as a print server.

[Millennium]

As an update to this, I have wiped the machine's hard drive and reinstalled 10.2. Thus far, it has not helped. Same problems with the System Profiler as before.

[eyadams]

Well, a few things come to mind.

- One of your USB devices may have gone bad. Try booting up with NONE of your USB devices plugged in, and then try plugging each one in in turn. If one of your devices is sending screwy data down the pipe, no card is going to work.

- Boot up into OS 9 and run its version of the Apple System Profiler. I found that USB devices were listed under that version, even though they weren't under the OS X version. It may help you determine if the problem is with the card, the Mac, or some device.

- Try getting another USB card. It is possible, though unlikely, that you got a bad USB card.

- Try running with only the USB card installed. This isn't likely to fix things, but it may give you some help.

- Boot OS X into "verbose" mode. You do this while holding down Command-V during the boot sequence. If there are problems with the USB card, you'll see text error messages to that effect. I found a problem with a USB driver that way.

Finally, see if you can think of anything that might have changed in the last few days. Have you acquired any new USB devices? When you clean-installed OS X, did you have to install any additional drivers to get things to work?

Good luck.