Fix slow USB ports on Linux

Q I have a D845WN Intel motherboard, which (according to the Intel website) has Hi-Speed USB 2.0 ports. Unfortunately I've not been able to attain high speeds, even after installing all the relevant software for my motherboard from the Intel site. I'm running Fedora on my machine and have an external USB 2.0 hard disk. Using it on USB 1.1 ports is extremely frustrating. Can you tell me how I can I enable Hi-Speed USB 2.0 speeds?

A USB 2.0 under Linux requires a supported USB 2.0 controller and the use of the EHCI module to access the USB subsystem. You can verify which USB modules your system is loading by using dmesg, which displays kernel information from system boot time. However, what you describe may be related to a problem with the EHCI module itself. The kernel 2.6. 01 source included EHCI driver software which seems to confuse some controller cards (To be fair, the EHCI drivers are still rather experimental). This can cause quite a few problems. The easiest way to fix your woes is to change your kernel. It is possible to go back to an earlier version, but before you try that, check out http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/3/ for updates to the Fedora kernel.

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