Serial interfaces

At 09:15 AM 7/20/2010, Ethan Dicks wrote: What drives me crazy is the lack of debugging of the stack. When it's not working on contemporary Windows kit, there's no way I've found to help understand what's not really working. This morning, I plugged a client's thumb drive into their laptop, and the logical drive seemed to disappear at random. I switch connectors, thinking it's a wonky physical connector, no difference. Just unreliable. Another stunner was that vmWare didn't support native USB on the host. They're accomplishing thousands of other miracles, but can't virtualize USB enough for me to connect a drive to a virtual appliance? (I think this is fixed in last month's major release.) I'm often trying to connect client hard drives to backup machines via USB-to-SATA/IDE adapters, and when the drive won't seem to wake-up or show up, there's no way to debug where it is failing. I suspect some of the opacity is deeper in Windows at the logical Disk Management level, with layers of "Disk 1" numbering, logical drives and partitions and SCSI emulation, a registry that records every drive fingerprint ever connected to it (really), etc. Last week, a client's thumb drives weren't being recognized. I had to reinstall Windows. I think Windows was failing at the very top layer, at the moment where a recognized device was known to be hard drive, but it couldn't show it as a logical drive. And yet so many built-in media-readers for CF/SD cards will show logical drive letters to the OS when there's nothing inserted. My desktop shows four. Why? - John