The broken PC saga continues, but is hopefully close to reaching a happy ending. Ever since doing the second format of my PC last week some time the front USB ports haven't worked, which wasn't a massive drama (okay, it's still annoying though) until I just bought a Maxtor One Touch III external drive thingy that just doesn't seem to work at all. I plug it into the front USB ports and obviously it does nothing, when I plug it into the back ports it fails to install but at least Windows recognises it (just has a yellow exclaimation mark and says device failed to start) and the lights on consistantly so I guess it's not a power problem. So, my USB ports are well and truely screwed. I'd love to sort it, and I'd love to sort the front USB ports too if possible. I've got an Asus a7n8x-e deluxe motherboard, afaik everything's setup correctly in the BIOS and I think the drivers installed correctly. I tried removing some of the USB devices from the device manager to try and re-install the drivers in case something was corrupt, in turn this just killed my mouse and keyboard and it wouldn't re-install when I rebooted the PC, yes, I'm dumb Any help in this matter would be ace, thanks!
Yup, have checked on the motherboard; definitely plugged in correctly! One other thing I should point out, is that when I leave this new Maxtor USB drive plugged in when I boot up the PC it freezes on the memory test at around 250mb~. As soon as I unplug the drive it shoots straight back up to the proper size and boots up as normal.
that maxtor uses external power does it not so that the power on is a false indicator? what is the chipset of the board & is the enhanced usb controller showing up in device manager?
@xkratosx I have that board with the same trouble at one time. Double check your usb connections, yes I know it's a pain. Pull the latest drivers from asus website if your using your original driver disk and install those. Also did you change anything your windows services startup? @ddp It's an NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset.
Pretty sure that it's USB powered, it only came with one cable anyway! It does have a separate port for power which is slightly concerning but no mention of requiring it in the manual and again there's no lead supplied for it, fingers crossed, eep! Will check the connections again, it's almost certainly connected just fine onto the motherboard, maybe something's come loose on the front panel but I'm not sure as I can't access/see it at all. Will try installing the new nForce 2 drivers, the USB 2.0 drivers on the Asus website don't actually work for some reason :/ Nope, I haven't changed anything in the Windows startup or services startup.
Quick update: The front USB ports seem to be working fine, in fact every thing seems to be working fine apart from this Maxtor. It still isn't working correctly even with the two USB ports plugged in (I presume one for power, one for data) - the lights show up fine, it recognises it as a Maxtor OneTouch III when you first connect it but then it just brings up an error saying "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". It also makes a beeping sound almost every time I connect it, and when I tried booting it up with the drive connected it froze on the POST screen again and was making all sorts of beeping noises, I wonder whether maybe the drive is corrupt, I guess the best thing to do would be to is try it on another PC if I can. It'd help if I could grab the drivers from somewhere 'cos I've got a feeling it could be a driver issue.
connect that drive on the back usb ports as might find it to work properly. found that out with my external 40gig laptop drive. might have to switch the drive usb cables around in the ports to get it to work as i have to do that with mine on occasion. is that the 3.5" version or 2.5" version?
Tried all different cable combinations, it's the 2.5" I think too. Just plugged it into my parent's 5 year old PC downstairs and it works just fine, bah.
seems that you are trying to get more power than your board will give the two connections are both power one is also data try moving your pc next to your parents pc and pluging the data into yours and the extra power into theirs or plug the extra power lead into a powered hub
Good suggestion thanks, I've just checked the power ratings though and my USB ports output 500mA apparantly which is 400mA more than the drive needs!
Sorry to post about this yet again, but I've just realised that I'm having what I think are USB problems when playing games too, for example I've tried TFC and Counter-Strike Source and quite often the input devices will lock and no matter what I press it'll just carry on doing what I was doing before, and then all of a sudden it'll do all of the commands I entered whilst it froze :/ Not sure if it's related, I guess it is, going to try removing every single driver related to the USB things in device manager and see how I get on, fingers crossed!
try reloading windows from the begining & load all the board drivers including the usb. if using xp remember to have sp1 or 2 so usb2 is working. if still doesn't work then either get a new motherboard or get a pci usb2 card. if get a card, try to get 1 that has at least 4 pins on it to connect 1 of the front usb ports.
Hmm, what a nightmare. I've fitted a USB 2.0 PCI card and not an awful lot has changed; the hard drive shows up in My Computer now at least and installs itself, but it's still incredibly unstable and keeps clicking/beeping every time I try to access something. Also, I tried running my mouse and keyboard through there and it's still lagging loads whilst playing any Steam game. The hard drive thing isn't going to be a massive problem, I'm just going to stick the PCI card in my parents PC, plug the hard drive in to there and just transfer the files I want to backup over the network, not an ideal solution but it's not going to bother me much either, so that's fine. The fact that Steam games are causing problems too (I assume it's a USB problem) is really going to bug me since I really enjoyed my recent game of TFC and there's a few Steam games coming out in the near future as wel. As certain as I am that it's a USB problem, it's odd that it only effects those games and other games I've briefly tried and Windows have ran just fine. I tried running my mouse through a USB -> PS2 adapter and it didn't work at all
