What started as a (relatively) simple USB printer solution turned into an exasperating journey into more than I ever wanted to know about USB under Macintosh OS 9. A client had a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet series), the kind without built in USB. OS 9.1. IOGear USB 2.0 PC-Card (Which under OS9 should work as a USB 1.1 interface). Canon MPC555 multi-function USB printer/fax/scan jobber.
Main problems: No printing. No waking from sleep. How to fix it? Let me tell you.
I noticed that the USB card wasn’t showing up as a USB card on the desktop — in OS 9, that’s where PCMCIA cards appear; this card was on the desktop, but there was no indication that it was a USB card. This led me to believe that the card didn’t have the proper extensions installed to support it; hence, a USB printer ain’t gonna show up either.
I also figured that this might be why the computer might not be waking from sleep. For instance, if you had a USB mouse, the system would have to listen to the USB interface for activity so that when you moved or clicked the mouse it would wake up. If the card weren’t being recognized fully, the system might be having issues.
As it turned out, the client had recently done a clean install of OS9.1, which had failed to install many of the USB support extensions. Fortunately, the “Previous system folder” contained all those extensions; found ’em, dragged ’em over, rebooted — card shows up properly, printing works again!
I put the machine to sleep. Wake it up. Great, Try again for shits and giggles. Wakes, but the finder crashes. Uh oh. Reboot. Try again. No wakey. So printing works, but the waking from sleep issue is as bad or worse than before.
Hmmm. Maybe there are bugs in OS 9.1, so I quickly decide to update the machine to 9.2.2; surely that’ll solve any kinks.
About 20 minutes later, the upgrade is done. I can now sleep and wake and sleep and wake, but… no printing. Argh!!!! At this point I’m wishing I had just let things be and advised the client to just avoid putting the machine to sleep — that’ll fix it. Too late for that though.
I begin to wonder if it’s a printer driver issue, so I take the powerbook from the client’s house over to the Hookup so I can partake in some high speed internet. I go ahead and update the drivers for the printer, which couldn’t hurt, but I still have my doubts about the USB card.
After some googling around, I find this extremely helpful page at Macintouch. Turns out a fair number of people had similar problems with the USB support after updating to 9.2.2.
In my case, it seems that since the USB extensions included on the 9.2.2 system disk from a PowerMac were version 1.5.8 ; the update packages downloaded from the web are version 1.5.6. The 1.5.8 versions are not quite compatible with third party PC-Cards. And so follows the no-worky.
After reading through many user reports about these issues, the final post mentioned that the good folks at Other World Computing were kind enough to supply the proper USB extensions (version 1.5.6) which work with third party USB cards.
Finally, I booted with extensions off, dragged over the older USB extensions. Took the laptop back to the client’s house. Turned on, printed, slept, woke — like I champ. Thank god.
Ultimately I share this somewhat boring and tedious story for a few reasons — first, as a cautionary tale against blindly updating systems as a panacea to problems. Secondly, as a dutiful reminder to google early and google often to find out who else has had issues like yours. And 2. a) to add one more search result for said googling. So, there you have it. One happy client, one annoyed (but ultimately rewarded) computer guy.