USB, Parallel Port problems after BIOS flash

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I have an Award 4.51PG BIOS that I flashed with an update to try to help it work with a new 80 Gig HD. Aside from the fact that it won't recongnize more than 32 Gigs, when I finally got the HD working, the USB ports stopped working, as did the parallel port. A computer guy got the parallel port to work by tweaking the values in the BIOS, but the onboard USB ports still won't work. I'm going to try to get a PCI USB card installed later today and hope thatit'll work, but other than that, my 3 1/2 year-old Pentium III computer is severely handicapping my printing and scanning with no working USB ports. Any help?

[Denniss]

IT's possible you picked a wrong Bios - reflash to your old Bios .
What's your board ?
The moderators here are able to patch your installed Bios to support up to 64GB or up to 128GB .

There are a couple of things going on that need further explanation: the BIOS flash came from the Phoenix-Award site and I had used it once before, in 1999 when the computer was about 6 mo old. There was no change in the system operation (it had been perfect and stayed that way). I've had 64, 128, 256 and a combination of the three in the 3 RAM slots and they worked OK prior to the addition of the Maxtor 80 Gig. I also need to add that in an attempt to get the computer to "recognize" and use the whole 80 Gigs, I bought an SIIG ATA 66 card and plugged it into an open PCI port. THIS seemed to be the thing that made the parallel and USB ports stop working. BTW, after getting my system home from the repairman and firing it up, it still won't do anything with the parallel or USB ports other than give me a blue screen of death when I try to reinstall the software for the printer (HP 1115) and scanner (UMAX 3400), both of which worked fine on the USB ports (and the printer would also work on the parallel port) before the SIIG card was tried. I'd immediately pulled the SIIG card and yanked the device from the list in the control panel, to no avail. I have "killed" the CMOS table using the procedure on the motherboard (a Tyan i440BX-NS351) and tried the BIOS both unflashed and flashed and still, no USB or parallel. I've forgotten to add that my PS2 wheelmouse stopped scrolling with the wheel the same time all of this went down. So....I have a brand new USB PCI card that I'd like to try, but I'm afraid that it would make it worse. Also, the computer repairman said that the only thing that he couldn't test or replace with a working unit is the PCI video card - could it be causing the problem?

[NickS]

I wonder if this is anything to do with IRQs being re-mapped ? PnP, etc ?

The computer guy who worked on did all sorts of tweaking in this area and nothing good came of it. It's still SOOOOOOO weird that trying new hardware would cause such a cascade of problems.