USB drivers oddity on Win2K

This is strange, and I'm wondering if it's something I've done.

We have a USB composite device that has two endpoints, one of which is used
as a debug channel and one which is a mass storage interface. The mass
storage interface works just fine.. however..

When our system (Windows 2000) crashes, it sometimes forgets that it needs
the "USB Composite Device" driver and we have to manually reinstall it! This
is somewhat tedious and painful, as you might expect, since it looks like
that driver has to be reinstalled for each port that we're putting one of
these devices on (ugh).

I've looked over our debug interface driver code and I can't find anything
that would cause Win2K to decide it doesn't need the composite interface any
longer.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Does WinXP handle composite
devices better? Are there any known issues with composite USB devices under
Win2K?

All help appreciated, I'm running out of hair to pull out!

Leo
Thu Oct 13 00:34:48 CDT 2005

> When our system (Windows 2000) crashes, it sometimes forgets that it needs
> the "USB Composite Device" driver and we have to manually reinstall it!
> This
> is somewhat tedious and painful, as you might expect, since it looks like
> that driver has to be reinstalled for each port that we're putting one of
> these devices on (ugh).

Hmm. Do you provide a serial number in the device descriptor?

Grab your descriptors from usbview and post them here.

Leo Havmøller.

EdAverill
Thu Oct 13 15:06:06 CDT 2005

Yes, each device has a unique serial # which is being sent when the
configuration is queried for, but only once the device has the OS flashed
into it.

Is there documentation anywhere on how Windows 2K/XP uses these serial
numbers? That would be very helpful...

Thanks for replying, by the way!

"Leo Havmøller" wrote:

> > When our system (Windows 2000) crashes, it sometimes forgets that it needs
> > the "USB Composite Device" driver and we have to manually reinstall it!
> > This
> > is somewhat tedious and painful, as you might expect, since it looks like
> > that driver has to be reinstalled for each port that we're putting one of
> > these devices on (ugh).
>
> Hmm. Do you provide a serial number in the device descriptor?
>
> Grab your descriptors from usbview and post them here.
>
> Leo Havmøller.
>
>
>

Maxim
Tue Oct 18 18:18:16 CDT 2005

> Is there documentation anywhere on how Windows 2K/XP uses these serial
> numbers? That would be very helpful...

Conversion of USB serials to PnP IDs is documented on MSDN.

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
maxim@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com