Associate
- Joined
- 4 Apr 2012
- Posts
- 956
I've been plagued by USB problems for some months now, and I strongly suspect my motherboard is malfunctioning as a result. Everything else in my system works as it should, bar generic/common driver issues.
My front USB 2.0 ports (on the PC case) are temperamental at best. Most of the time one of them won't accept a particular gamepad, giving an error: "the last usb device you connected has malfunctioned". It's just this specific gamepad - my other gamepad, and all my other usb drives detect correctly on this port, and "seem" to work fine. But I know it's a problem with the port because the gamepad is recognised in all the other USB ports... usually. Today, for the first time, the gamepad gave the same error on a back USB port, while it continued to work on the other supposedly functional ports. And very VERY rarely, the one always-faulty front USB port does recognise the gamepad, though I have no idea what influences this.
In addition to one of the ports failing to detect my gamepad, both front ports slightly corrupt data that's transferred through them. It's very subtle, and I only noticed when I transferred some colourful fast-paced animated video clips onto an OLED display (displays blacks very well) equipped portable media player. Dark colours/some occasional frames would get pixelated/corrupted, while the same videos transferred via a "safe" USB port turned out fine. I'm 100% sure it's the USB ports because I spent weeks watching corrupted videos thinking my player was to blame until I happened to try a different USB port and the corruption went away.
My Fractal Arc Midi PC case isn't to blame either because the second USB header on my motherboard works without problems, using the same front USB ports. I should mention the USB 3.0 port on the case works flawlessly to my knowledge.
In other words most of the time and without careful inspection the ports seem fine, while in reality there's obviously something wrong. I'd have left the problem alone but because today, the back port exhibited faulty symptoms, I'm worried ALL my USB ports are subtly malfunctioning, at least sometimes.
These problems have persisted through all my OS reinstalls (Win7&8), motherboard BIOS updates, chipset driver updates, and hardware changes. No motherboard settings make any difference. Power settings (USB selected suspend sleep thingy) don't make a difference. I've tried unplugging everything I can from the PC when using the faulty USB headers. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling USB drivers. Windows Event Viewer doesn't flag anything, and my HDDs are free of problems. I don't think there's any troubleshooting step I've missed, and I've spent months Googling, which uncovered nothing useful.
Is it time to RMA a defective motherboard, or could something else be the cause of the problems? I've been dreading a motherboard RMA to MSI, but if it's definitely a defective mobo I have no choice. Whatever it is there's no way I can tolerate the issue now that there's the distinct possibility that my back ports are broken as well as the front ports. I now feel unsafe backing up my data via USB, and that's the only backup method available to me. I'm already ****ed because my currently nearly full 1TB backup drive could just be full of corrupt data, including some really important stuff... help please!
Mainboard: MSI Z77a-G43
Edit: Solved some time ago (forgot about this thread). USB problems were caused by MSI drivers.
My front USB 2.0 ports (on the PC case) are temperamental at best. Most of the time one of them won't accept a particular gamepad, giving an error: "the last usb device you connected has malfunctioned". It's just this specific gamepad - my other gamepad, and all my other usb drives detect correctly on this port, and "seem" to work fine. But I know it's a problem with the port because the gamepad is recognised in all the other USB ports... usually. Today, for the first time, the gamepad gave the same error on a back USB port, while it continued to work on the other supposedly functional ports. And very VERY rarely, the one always-faulty front USB port does recognise the gamepad, though I have no idea what influences this.
In addition to one of the ports failing to detect my gamepad, both front ports slightly corrupt data that's transferred through them. It's very subtle, and I only noticed when I transferred some colourful fast-paced animated video clips onto an OLED display (displays blacks very well) equipped portable media player. Dark colours/some occasional frames would get pixelated/corrupted, while the same videos transferred via a "safe" USB port turned out fine. I'm 100% sure it's the USB ports because I spent weeks watching corrupted videos thinking my player was to blame until I happened to try a different USB port and the corruption went away.
My Fractal Arc Midi PC case isn't to blame either because the second USB header on my motherboard works without problems, using the same front USB ports. I should mention the USB 3.0 port on the case works flawlessly to my knowledge.
In other words most of the time and without careful inspection the ports seem fine, while in reality there's obviously something wrong. I'd have left the problem alone but because today, the back port exhibited faulty symptoms, I'm worried ALL my USB ports are subtly malfunctioning, at least sometimes.
These problems have persisted through all my OS reinstalls (Win7&8), motherboard BIOS updates, chipset driver updates, and hardware changes. No motherboard settings make any difference. Power settings (USB selected suspend sleep thingy) don't make a difference. I've tried unplugging everything I can from the PC when using the faulty USB headers. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling USB drivers. Windows Event Viewer doesn't flag anything, and my HDDs are free of problems. I don't think there's any troubleshooting step I've missed, and I've spent months Googling, which uncovered nothing useful.
Is it time to RMA a defective motherboard, or could something else be the cause of the problems? I've been dreading a motherboard RMA to MSI, but if it's definitely a defective mobo I have no choice. Whatever it is there's no way I can tolerate the issue now that there's the distinct possibility that my back ports are broken as well as the front ports. I now feel unsafe backing up my data via USB, and that's the only backup method available to me. I'm already ****ed because my currently nearly full 1TB backup drive could just be full of corrupt data, including some really important stuff... help please!
Mainboard: MSI Z77a-G43
Edit: Solved some time ago (forgot about this thread). USB problems were caused by MSI drivers.
Last edited: