Smart Card Reader

**clocker** · 11-09-2003, 03:12 PM

I recently bought a Soyo Bay One smart card reader.

.
The card reader function of the unit simply plugs into a USB header on my motherboard.
The installation CD for this reader appears to load only a little tray icon called "Icon Mon" which, when right clicked, has but one option -"Force".

Hook the USB header up and hark! all the various card readers show up in My Computer as different Drives with Removable Storage right along with my CD-RW and DVD-ROM.
The device also shows up in the Device Manager and shows that it working properly...no little yellow exclamation points.

Most importantly, it will read the memory card from my digicam.
All would seem peachy.

About every 5-6 reboots (which I've been doing a lot lately as I screw around with my hardware configuration&#33

the reader fails to appear in My Computer and shows up in Device Manager as 'unknown storage device"
Clicking the "force" option on the Icon Monitor does nothing.
If I reach into the case and briefly unplug the USB connection then replug it, the reader reappears in my computer and all is again hunkey dory.

Basically, every so often either my computer fails to look for the device on this USB connector (I have tried switching to the alternate USB header on my mobo and that doesn't help) or (my personal favorite theory) at bootup the device fails to raise it's hand and announce it's presence to the OS.
Either way it's very irritating.
I've been to the Soyo website and although they do list the device in the sales/product section, there is no mention of it in the download drivers/patches/upgrade firmware section.

Any suggestions?

**clocker** · 11-09-2003, 07:50 PM

*bump*

C'mon.
Anyone?
Anything?

**MediaSlayer** · 11-09-2003, 09:40 PM

clocker a very similar thing happened to me with my digicam, which works fine now. I would install it, then later on at some point it would not appear in my computer and also appear as "unknown device" in device manager. You have at least 2 choices.
1. you could wait for others to solve your problem
2. you could wait for me to get off my lazy ass and remember how i fixed mine and write the post to tell you how to fix yours

i said "at least" because you have other choices. If you're patient I'll look into it later, but right now I'm eating a firegrilled shrimp salad from Wendy's and that's pretty damn important to me at the moment. good luck

**clocker** · 11-09-2003, 10:02 PM

Please,
Take your time.

Shrimp should never be made to wait.

Then wipe you face off good and get back here and fix this.

**MediaSlayer** · 11-10-2003, 08:10 AM

Ok, I'm assuming you've got XP sp1 with a decent amount of patches installed, besides service pack 1 itself. Ok here goes:
Go into services.msc and verify that you have "windows image acquisition" and "shell hardware detection" set to "automatic". Also check to see if those 2 services are started, which they should be. Then reboot with those services, running. Problem is, if you've already installed the software for it, all the drivers will be already on the computer. I don't know if that would matter. Perhaps you should uninstall, clean everything up, and then start from scratch. Then install with those services running. At any rate, if that doesn't help, certain patches available from ms update might help. After I installed sp1a and installed a bunch of patches(i have the list , it's kinda long though) my cam works fine. Just post back, if you need the list, i will type it in notepad.

Also:from my experience on this computer it seems as though its better to plug a device in and let windows find it, when installing for the first time. After windows finds it, of course the window will pop up and say"new hardware found" or whatever. Then it will ask for the installation disk. After putting it in, I usually don't specify the path, I usually let windows find the drivers it wants to install automatically. I just point to the drive, and windows does the rest.

**clocker** · 11-10-2003, 02:00 PM

Slayer,

Thank you for your response.
My "Windows Image Acquisition" was set to manual and was NOT started. It is now automatic.
As previously stated, the installation CD for this product doesn't have any drivers, it simply uses the USB functionality built into Windows.
I did uninstall the "unknown storage device" and then reboot plugging the USB cable back in after the process.
As usual, the icons reappeared and all seems well.
I rebooted 5 more times and it's still there.
I am cautiously optimistic.

BTW, yes, I have SP1 and every critical update available. I also have every recommended update that seems even remotely relevant to my machine.

Now we just have to wait and see.

It's funny that a little POS device like this one can turn into such a headache.

Edit: Another possibility has arisen to explain this screw up. The various different readers will show up in My Computer with icons exactly like the standard ones that XP uses for the CD and DVD storage drives. The software installed by the Soyo CD is simply a icon monitor that changes the generic icon display to a custom one that shows the various names of the different types of media that this will read (i.e. "SmartCard", etc....). I deleted this Icon Manager software ( it kinda irritated me to have it sitting in my Systray doing nothing) and so far the device has reappeared after several reboots with no problems. It could be that the Soyo software was buggy and prevented Windows from assigning the generic icons at the same time failing to generate the custom icons that it should have.
That's my theory at the moment and I'm sticking to it...

**clocker** · 11-13-2003, 05:14 AM

Well, my theory ( of which I was so proud, btw) turned out to be ah....worthless.
After two and a half days of running I had to shutdown to do some reconfiguring and the smart card reader had disappeared again.

I must admit that this POS had really gotten to me. I was NOT going to let it win.
After some thought I came up with a hardware fix. I am apparently not clever enough to figure out a software solution, so a kludge fix was my last resort. I am not proud, but I am stubborn.

I reasoned that since a simple unplug/ replug of the USB header was all it took to bring the auxiliary drives back to life that splicing a simple on/off switch into the 5v (red) wire of the USB cable would achieve the same as unplugging, etc. As far as the motherboard was concerned I was doing the same thing.

It has worked.

The switch, which balances nicely with my "Clear CMOS" switch, will activate the smart cards without fail.
Truly, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

I am so proud of myself.