USB problems

[Lynn David Newton]

Greetings,

I think there's something wrong with the USB bus on my
computer, but I'm looking for a clearer explanation.

The system is a home constructed AMD64 running SuSE
9.2, about a year and a half old. Has never given me a
lick of trouble.

Symptoms:

o One day I rebooted my computer and found that I could
  not mount my external 160GB drive. fsck would not do
  anything. At first it was giving me a bad superblock
  message. Not good, but sometimes symptomatic of less
  than the worst possible scenario, namely a disk
  crash. Right now fsck says it's not a valid block
  device. The node is in fact a block device. 
  Presumably its not being a "valid" one is determined
  by trying to access the physical device and not
  finding it.

o I also have a generic card reader on the bus to read
  my digital camera's SD cards. The green light doesn't
  even come on. I pulled it off and threw it on the
  Mac, where it worked fine. This suggests maybe the
  external drive is okay, and that there's a bus
  problem.

o The external drive is hanging off a port on the back
  of the system. (I tried moving it to the second one
  with no improvement.) The card reader is off a port
  on the front.

o lsusb
  Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
  Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
  Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
  Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

  Looks kinda like nothing's there, eh?

But wait, there's more:

o I have a gizmo on the bus -- a USB powered keyboard
  vacuum[1] -- and it gets power and whirs away, doing
  what it's supposed to do to the best of its inept
  ability when I push the buttons. So at least there's
  power coming through.

I'm not sure what to do from here. Suggestions?

Footnotes:
[1]  Close to worthless, if you've been considering
     buying one.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ