USB outage in Dell 700m

It was just a little annoying when I found the USB mouse stopped working , touchpad outage happens before. Then I plugged the usb jumpdrive to the usb port, it was supposed to be automounted by ivman to /media/usbdisk, but the magic does not happen, and I got the following messages in the log:

sudo tail /var/log/messages
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:23 puma usb 4-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:24 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
Feb 6 15:43:24 puma usb 4-1: device not accepting address 4, error -71
Feb 6 15:43:24 puma usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
Feb 6 15:43:25 puma usb 4-1: device not accepting address 5, error -71

I sweated. Were the USB ports still alive? To make things more clear, I rebooted the machine with Gentoo 2005.1 LiveCD, still no luck. OMG, the warranty of this laptop had been expired, I might need a bulky PCMCIA usb adpater for all USB devices if I did not want to replace the motherboard. Let’s have the finial shoot, rebooted the machine with Dell diagnose disc, run the “USB test”, all test passed. I felt a little relieved, then reboot the machine to Linux, the USB ports revived. What a miracle ! Dell 700m always gives me some surprises. Do they think this would make our life more colorful?