Z87-GD65 Gaming aggressively dislikes a card reader

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Hak Foo

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I had almost talked myself out of going Haswell, but a local retailer was selling Z87-GD65s for $70 plus the opportunity to claim a $40 rebate, so it made it budget-feasible.

What I notice is that the system will usually cold-start fine, but if rebooted, it hangs at code 9C.  This is remedied by unplugging my internal card reader.

When I get into Windows, I get a lot of "device detected/device removed" sounds for no clear reason.  Again, removing the card reader fixes it.

Finally, when the reader IS working, it behaves differentlly than it used to-- you used to see many drive letters for each slot, now just the one for the slot that contains a card.

The reader is fairly new, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820130013.

It behaved itself just fine on a 990FXA-GD80.

1.  Is it possible for a card-reader to cause that much trouble?
2.  Is this something that might be fixable with a BIOS or software patch, or should I just get a different reader?

Full Specs:
4790K at stock, currently under a Cooler Master Seidon 120M I had lying around
16Gb Corsair DDR3-1600 (4x4 sticks, really old stuff that you have to enable XMP to have a timing for 1600)
Z87-GD65, BIOS 1.B
MSI GTX770
Crucial MX100 512Gb, Corsair Neutron GTX 240Gb, Samsung HD103UJ 1Tb rotating-rust
Seasonic 660W Platinum PSU
Win81
 
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What kind of cards do you normally use in the reader? I've seen others with similar problem and solution as you surmise was getting a reader that just reads the type of cards you normally use instead of one that reads nearly every card ever made. Win 8/8.1 has many hardware glitches like that and that's a big reason I still use Win 7.
 
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Typically SD and MicroSD, occasionally a prehistoric CF card.

However, as mentioned, it was perfectly happy on a previous incarnation of this machine days ago, also running Windows 8.1.  However, that one was an AMD 990FX board.
 
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Sorry for the necroposting.

Here's what I eventually discovered, in case anyone else is having similar issues:

I also tried an external card reader-- an "Aibo" brand one that I bought from a Taiwanese site.  It was detaching and reattaching all the time, on both 2.0 and 3.0 ports.

I got more promising results when I plugged in an old internal one-- so old it didn't even read SDHC cards-- but I had no cards to test with, except one old 96Mb CF card.  Strangely, this had the same USB ID numbers as the modern reader which failed.

It seems like the card readers are actually somehow getting the USB controllers into an unrecoverably confused state, because once you used one, the port would no longer respond correctly to a working USB device, like a flash drive, until you rebooted.

Then, I took a few weeks off getting my RAM RMA'd for unrelated issues.

When I finally got back to it, I started twiddling knobs in the BIOS, and it seems like setting "USB legacy support" to "Disabled" seemed to get it to behave properly.  (Once you power down to get the USB stack de-confused from any previous attachments) for a while.  I could add and remove cards and reboot without a hassle.  Doesn't get stuck at 9C on boot, cards read fine.  The one odd thing is that now the USB device list in the BIOS is incorrect.  Board Explorer shows no devices connected on any USB ports anymore, either front or back, and the listing on the USB-related settings page is something like "1 mouse, 2 keyboards, 2 hubs".  It should be something like "1 mouse, 2 keyboards, 4 mass storage (the card reader, which is labelled as such by every other board I've ever used), 1 misc (an Xbox360 wireless controller reciever)"

Theory:  Legacy mode does some of the heavy lifting initializing devices for, say, DOS, and maybe it's doing it wrong for some devices.  These devices don't show up in the BIOS anymore, but when the OS boots, the setup finishes off correctly.

Further research:

"Disable legacy mode" seems to mean fun side effects like "no keyboard in the prompt on a Linux bootable CD".

I also managed to get the card reader back to its usual non-working self.  It seems to have gotten out of its groove when I tried using a USB keyboard's "power" key to boot the system instead of the usual power switch.  Good old Code 9C until you hard powered off.  I also noticed the following symptoms seemed in play:

Under Windows, it sometimes would hang on power off-- CPU fan spools up, POST LEDs display 04, but it doesn't shut down in the usual timeframe.  Looking at other discussions of code 04, I suspect this might have to do with "it's trying to shut down by suspending, as that fastboot feature, but gets hung up"
Under Linux, no power-off on system halt.

I think there are either USB-related issues with this board, or the BIOS, that you can pretty easily evoke with nothing more than a ten-dollar card reader.  I overall like the board, and I can't argue with the price I paid, but I'm beginning to wonder if I'm just due for a long period of not being able to read cards on my PC.
 
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Tried that.  It seemed to help briefly, but the overall situation is still erratic.

From what I can figure out:

The USB 2.0 ports are a lot more problematic than the 3.0 ones.

Devices seem to come in different flavours:

* Some devices just work (mice, keyboards, graphics tablet, 360 controller reciever).
* Some work fine in a 3.0 socket, but not correctly in a 2.0 (Corsair Slider flash drive-- it blinks and isn't correctly detected a fair amount of the time).
* Some just don't work most of the time, period (card-readers).

The most typical failure mode seems to be a long series of connect/disconnect sequences until you get fed up and remove the device.  The alternative is just showing no signs of the device whatsoever.

Once I've connected a problematic device, I often get strange behaviour at shutdown.  Specifically, it will either spin up the CPU fan and hang, or it will power back on moments after being shut down.

Turning off "wake via USB device" tends to discourage it from powering back on after shutdown.
Turning off "legacy USB support" seems to make some devices less problematic, but is not a complete solution.  It also has frustrating side effects (no keyboard at critical boot moments)

I have the feeling that because the USB components have to be running somewhat, even after power down, to handle stuff like "Wake the PC by moving the mouse", once it gets confused, it's difficult to un-confuse it.

It's getting extremely close to the 30-day return window with the retailer... and part of me is thinking it might be time to try another unit.
 
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Hak Foo said:
It's getting extremely close to the 30-day return window with the retailer... and part of me is thinking it might be time to try another unit.
Click to expand...

Given what you've seen with the board so far, I wouldn't even think about it. Do it before you run out of time.
 
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