Yesterday I received my new SAM3U-EK and still feel as though I'm in at the deep end. In particular, I set it up on my WinXP system and all seemed well. It ran its demo's as expected and allowed me to connect it over USB. I backed up the demo files as recommended and plugged in an SD card, which worked a treat. Today I started to prepare for development work and set the board up ready to use. This time, no joy on the USB.

The WinXP system will not recognise the SAM3U-EK at all. The device manager shows two storage volumes that are "ATMEL mass storage MSD USB devices" and, judging by the display, the SAM3U-EK seems to think it is connected, but nothing in explorer. Any attempt to access the devices in the device manager, causes a hang for around 10-15 minutes. At the last attempt, Explorer hung as well, without being prompted. Other USB devices, sich as printer and myPassport backup drives are fine.

Just occasionally, Explorer will put the drive up, but any attempt to access it, gives
"G:\ is not accessible ... because of an I/O device error" and then it immediately removes it again.

So it looks like I've come to a sticky end.

Can anyone suggest a solution, or where to look for a solution?
Do I need to re-load the software in some way (which way I wonder, as I don't have a serial port on this macine - yet)?

Oswy

Firstly an apology for miss-spelling USB in the topic title. I suppose I really should be able to spell that.

Secondly, it looks like the USB problem is not with my SAM3U-EK. Moving the card from machine to machine, showed the problem was restricted to the XP development machine. So after a bit of experimenting I have been able to cure the problem, and then repeat it.
If anyone else has this problem, the cure is to switch the machine off and let it stand for a couple of minutes, with the power line disconnected (30 seconds looks as though it will be enough but YMMV). After the reboot connect the SAM3U-EK (with power off) to the host, using the USB. Then power on the SAM3U-EK and, in the demo software select the USB option and then the connect option (the USB stick icon on the right). After a few seconds you will see the XP media-player displayed on the host, asking for an application to use. Cancel this and shortly after, you will see the appropriate drive letters displayed in Windows Explorer. Then all is connected and ready to go.

The cause.
When you want to shut down the USB link. If you don't cleanly "Remove" the link from Windows, it's possible to lock things up and stop Windows from recognising a re-connection. So to remove the USB link always do the following (which is obvious, but it's also easy to take short cuts, that don't work):
1) Select the USB 'close' icon from the bottom right of the task bar. This icon is a tiny image of a disk drive with a left pointing green arrow above it. Right Click on this icon.
2) A little message box is displayed which says "Safely remove hardware". It is important to right click, rather than left click, as left clicking will give you the options to remove the individual drives. Doing this will probably annoy windows into telling you it can't do this, as they are in use, and to try later. You need to be able to remove the whole mass storage device, hence the right click.
3) Click on the "Safely remove hardware" message, and a dialogue box will be displayed, with the same name, usually at the top left of the screen. This dialoge box will have one or more lines of "USB Mass Storage Device". Select the one you want and then click the "Stop" button. If you don't know which one is the corrent one, double click on the appropriate USB icon to expand the details.
4) Having stopped the USB device, it is safe to unplug it. After that, tidy up any dialogue boxes you have left open, and you're done.

All very long winded, but if it helps anyone else, it will have been worth it.

Oswy