Strange USB device Code 43 error - solved - hope it helps

[Carol Haynes]

I had a very strange problem today - I inserted an SD camera card and nothing happened except that there was a logged error in the System Events about a faulty disk controller.

Looking in Device manager there was an unknown USB device that had been disabled by Windows (Code 43) to stop further damage to my system.

I rarely use the card slots so I don't know when this error appeared but I have had a couple of freezes recently and wonder if this was the cause.

Searching the web I found non-working internal card readers (connected to a 7 pin USB header) seem to often spontaneously stop working with a Code 43 error and I couldn't find a solution. One case a Dell engineer had visited someone and swapped the part but still couldn't get it to work and eventually gave up with a 'hardware fault'.

Well at least for me I have solved the issue by taking the CMOS battery out for 5 minutes and then resetting the BIOS back to system defaults. When the computer started again there were 4 non working "mobile devices" listed (with the error cannot start device) but the unknown USB device had disappeared and been replaced with a "USB Mass Storage" device. Rebooting again and it is all back to normal.

I have no idea what has happened - maybe it was a system freeze that caused the problem or maybe the device caused the freeze.

Now all I have to do is write a rude letter to Gigabyte and ask why they placed the CMOS battery and CMOS clear jumper under the PCIe cards (between the device slots and the back plate) which meant removing graphics and sound cards just to change the battery!!

Hope this helps someone in the future.

[longrun]

Just curious--did you try deleting the entries from Device Manager and refreshing or rebooting? Sometimes that alone solves the problem.

[Carol Haynes]

Yes and tried looking for drivers manually (of course it is impossible to find any!). I even deleted the all of the USB controllers and allowed the whole USB set to reinstall on reboot.

I can't fathom what has happened to the CMOS settings to cause this but one thing I did find searching the internet is that it is a common problem on Windows Xp, Vista and 7 and is no respecter of device manufacturer or the architecture you are using!!!!