Sunday, June 05, 2005

nForce3 and USB1.1

I have a machine with nForce 3 chipset and an XDRUM XD-403 MP3 player (USB 1.1). These don't work very well together. In Windows XP, I could copy files to the player, but once I tried to upgrade the firmware of the player and that failed midway. Luckily the player has a firmware recovery mode. In GNU/Linux I couldn't get the player to mount even once, there was always some transfer errors that prevented that from working.

After a lot of Googling I found the probable cause and the solution - the nForce chipsets don't work well with USB 1.1 devices that don't follow the specs, but connecting an externally powered USB 2.0 hub between the computer and the player fixes the problem. And indeed, that worked in my case too. I bought a rather cheap D-Link USB 2.0 hub, and now everything works fine both in Windows and Linux.

References:
1. TCC370-based device fails with NForce based mainboard
2. Application Note nForce2 MCP-T/MCP USB 1.1 Device Compatibiity

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