Mac OS freezes when inserting USB PCMCIA card

[MacFlavio]

Hi everyone

 

I need your help. I've been lurking around this forum quite a bit in the last few weeks, but I seem unable to solve the following problem. I have installed iPC 10.5.6 distro on an old Toshiba Satellite 1405-S171 laptop computer. The laptop's specs are:

 

Intel Celeron 1.5 GHz (P4-based Celeron, SSE2 only)

Intel i845 ICH3-M chipset

512 MB RAM

S3 SuperSavage Graphics Card

Yamaha AC-XG AC'97 Sound Card

Intel Pro/100 VE Ethernet

 

In the beginning, I couldn't even get it to boot. Installation completed successfully but during restart it just stopped showing the following error message: "using 2621 buffer headers and 2621 cluster IO buffer headers". I was able to get past that by selecting "ACPI fix" during installation. I also had to select a kext to get it to recognize the PS/2 keyboard. After that it booted successfully and everything else seems to work (sound and network card too). However there is still one annoying problem. This laptop computer has two PCMCIA Cardbus slots for expansion cards. Using IOPCMCIAFamily.kext installed in "\System\Library\Extensions" (version 3.2.8 by Chun Nan, I think), I was able to get Mac OS to detect the PCMCIA slots (without this kext, it didn't even detect the slots properly). If nothing is inserted in the expansion slots, the system works fine. But when I plug in a USB 2.0 PCMCIA expansion card the computer freezes after just a few seconds. At first, mouse movement becomes choppy and then after a few more seconds it hangs completely.

 

I have been reading lots of topics on the forum looking for a solution, and found that deleting AppleUSBUHCI.kext from IOUSBFamily.kext allows me to use a pen drive with my USB 2.0 PCMCIA expansion card without making the computer hang up (though it does not seem to run at USB 2.0 speeds), but there is a major drawback... the USB 1.1 ports integrated on the motherboard stop working completely and they no longer recognize any device. If I put back AppleUSBUHCI I go back to the previous situation: integrated USB 1.1 works but computer freezes as soon as I insert a card into the PCMCIA slots. I also tried to remove AppleUSBEHCI and leave only AppleUSBUHCI, because I had read that they might conflict with each other, to see if at least the computer would stop freezing when inserting the expansion card... but it didn't work. Even with AppleUSBUHCI only installed, it still locked up when inserting the card in a PCMCIA slot.

 

Also, if I try to boot the operating system with the USB 2.0 card already inserted in the PCMCIA slot (using the -v flag) I noticed I repeatedly get the following error message (before it eventually hangs): "AppleUSBUHCI: controller reset failed".

 

Does anybody know if there is a solution to this problem ? I've been fighting with it for weeks and I'm kind of frustrated I also tried to install other distros (iDeneb, iAtkos) but couldn't even get them to boot. The only one that worked was iPC 10.5.6.

 

Thank you very much,

 

Flavio