Resolved USB Ports not working.

I picked up a laptop from a customer today where the issue is that the USB ports don't work. She said that she connected a new (large) external hard drive to it the other day and it gave her the option to use the new hard drive to optimise windows (Readyboost possibly??) which she mistakenly accepted. Now the USB ports don't accept anything thats plugged in. I stuck in my pen drive and although it lit up that was as far as it went. I tried uninstalling/reinstalling the USB Root Hubs but this made no difference.

The question is this: Is there a simple fix for this or do I dust down the recovery CD?

As she's paying for my time by the hour, if there's no simple solution, then its not cost effective to spend an inordinate amount of time tracking the solution to this problem down.

 

Any chance she damaged the USB infrastructure when she connected the drive...

Does device manager show any problems?

 

No - Device manager shows everthing normal. No yellow question marks or anything else out of the ordinary. The thing is that all the USB ports are affected. She only plugged it into one of them. I'm going to boot it into a linux live CD to check it though...

 

Good shout, if USB works with the Live Boot consider a system restore to a time prior to the problem.

 

This isn't looking good at all. The faulty laptop doesn't recognise either my usb mouse or my pen drive when I boot it into Linux Mint or Knoppix. On the other hand, when I boot my own laptop with either Mint or Knoppix both devices are recognised immediately.
However, when booting the faulty laptop into windows, and checking device manager the usb root hubs are all shown as working properly.

Any suggestions?? It would appear that a reinstall is now pointless... or is it?

 

I'd think hardware failure myself, windows can't determine if devices are actually working as expected, only that they appear to be.

Since 3 OS's are indicating issues I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a software resolution.

 

Yeah.. I think I'll be phoning her in the morning with the bad news...

 

FWIW and this is only a guess HD's need a lot of power and the best external ones have their own power supply, others would draw current from two USB ports whilst I've heard of cheap ones only using the 1 port.

My (again I'll emphasise) guess is she either connected the HD incorrectly or it was a cheap design and the drive drew too much current through the USB HUB causing it to fail.

 

I connected the drive to a new laptop she bought yesterday and it works fine. Whether the newer laptop puts out more power or not remains to be seen. Can't remember what the make of the new HD was.

 

It's more the case (and particulary how it gets power) rather than the HD inside. Anyway we'll leave it at fried hardware unless someone else has any suggestions.

 

It took the power from the usb port. It must have overloaded the usb supply in some way.

 

I got a PCMCIA 4 port cardbus and I've got usb ports on this laptop again. So this is now resolved.
Could one of the moderators move this to the hardware forum as its now proved to be a hardware fault.
Thanks,
Don.

 

Thanks for the update Don, not an ideal resolution but at least she has USB now.