Computer not recognising USB connections

Phaser · 14 Jun 2007 at 23:09

Hi,

Ever since I reformatted my computer it's stopped picking up USB connections. It recognises them, and the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon appears in the taskbar but I can't actually use it.

I've tried different USB ports, different things such as mp3 players, external hard drives and still nothing.

I even thought it was my mp3 player so I went out and forked out £200 on a new one. Got it home, connected it up and nothing. Have to use my laptop to transfer songs on to it.

I thought it was perhaps driver related, but i've installed the USB 2.0 drivers that came on the disk and still nothing.

Spec is an Asus barebones unit, it's the Vintage AE1 along with a A64 3000+ and 1GB of Samsung RAM.

Any ideas?

I got an external hard drive today from OCUK. Didn't work on the USB port so I connected it via firewire. All good. I went to plug it in again earlier and now it's not picking it up. Great - £120 down the drain.

Anyone got any ideas about the whole USB thing, and how I can get this hard drive working? It all lights up etc and I was transferring files fine before but like I said, plugged it in earlier and it's like the USB issue again, not picking it up on the computer.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Davey D · 14 Jun 2007 at 23:22

Have you checked all the plugs are correctly plugged into the headers on your motherboard? ive had it before on my XPC Shuttle pc where USB stuff didnt work correctly.... it ended up being the plug had half pulled off the motherboard

Phaser · 15 Jun 2007 at 09:49

Good point, will check it out tonight mate.

misterPK · 15 Jun 2007 at 09:53

One of my trademark stupid suggestions here, but have you re-installed the drivers that came with each USB item you're trying to use?

PK!

ron3003 · 15 Jun 2007 at 09:54

After reformatting did you re-install sp2 on xp, you need that to get usb 2.0 again.

Egon · 15 Jun 2007 at 10:02

Could also be an issue with the way windows assigns drive letters, this is a very common network issue if you have network drives mapped to early drive letters such as E: F: G: etc.

If you don't have any netweork drives try just playing around with the drive letters and free up some of the early ones.

Phaser · 15 Jun 2007 at 10:10

misterPK said:
One of my trademark stupid suggestions here, but have you re-installed the drivers that came with each USB item you're trying to use?

PK!

Yep.

ron3003 said:
After reformatting did you re-install sp2 on xp, you need that to get usb 2.0 again.

Yeah - SP2 is already installed.

EgonSpengler said:
Could also be an issue with the way windows assigns drive letters, this is a very common network issue if you have network drives mapped to early drive letters such as E: F: G: etc.

If you don't have any netweork drives try just playing around with the drive letters and free up some of the early ones.

Hmm, I have 1 hard drive, split into 2. C: and D:

The external hard drive labelled itself as F:

ron3003 · 15 Jun 2007 at 16:37

Next to last stupid suggestion - you did re-install the motherboard chipset drivers after installing windows?
Last stupid suggestion - control panel/system/hardware/device manager....scroll down to usb devices and uninstall everything.....then reboot so that windows re-installs them all.

kitfit1 · 15 Jun 2007 at 22:41

Apart from what ron3003 has suggested, have you tried bumping up your chipset voltage a notch. When i'm bios testing and trying to get my clock up, my card reader drives can vanish. Upping the chipset voltage a notch sorts it out straight away.

Phaser · 16 Jun 2007 at 08:31

Think i've sorted it guys. Was looking in my BIOS and saw a USB 2.0 setting - it was set to High Speed. I changed it to Full Speed and my external hard drive is now working via USB. Haven't tried anything else yet.