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!

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.

Heya blizeH

I would first go to the ASUS website and download the latest chipset drivers and USB drivers (if the USB drivers aren't included in the chipset drivers). If after installing them your device manager shows that all your drivers are installed correctly and you test multiple USB devices in each port with no luck, then I would probably assume your USB ports are defective. If your back ones work but the front ones don't, I would take a look inside the case to double check the front USB ports are hooked up correctly.

You can always try installing a PCI card to add more USB ports that way. Of course you lose the luxury of having your front USB ports. Maybe there is a way to replace your front USB ports and attach them to a PCI USB port card. Haven't seen anything like that myself, but it may exist.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the reply I've grabbed the USB drivers from the Asus website but it doesn't seem to accept them, I'm going to install the latest nForce drivers as soon as I get home to see if that helps the situation too. It's definitely all reported as being fine in the device manager too, so I'll check inside the case one last time to see if there are any problems there, is it worth checking jumper settings too?

The PCI card way is kind of tempting, but I've already got two or four spare ports so it's not really a problem that I'm missing the front ones for anything but a convinience thing.

Any idea why this hard drive could cause my computer to crash when it's doing the memory test during boot up btw?

I doubt there are jumper settings on the motherboard related to the front USB ports, but if there is anything that ASUS is good at is manuals. Check the manual about setting up front USB ports and see what it tells you to do.

As far as the USB HD causing boot up problems, it may be related to the USB issue you are currently having. Check your BIOS to make sure removable/USB devices aren't trying to boot before your primary hard drive. That may help. Otherwise, just leave the HD unplugged until you are in Windows.

My guess is your USB controller as a whole is probably partially defective.

Nope, just checked, seems there are no jumper settings involved, and it's definitely all connected okay!

Good call on the boot up problems, although it's not set to that and it happens during the memory test for some reason, way before it tries to boot from partitions, but that's not a problem since I can just plug it in whilst in Windows like you say, just thought it may be related.

Hmm, I guess it could be, although it was working perfectly before the format!

The only thing the format would have done to cause USB problems is remove the USB controller drivers and they didn't reinstall when you restored your OS. So unless you chose the wrong drivers, the only other problem I can think that could cause the symptoms you are saying is your USB controller/ports is/are going bad and it was just coincidental it happened around the same time.

Are you testing multiple USB devices in all the ports? Or just the Maxtor? If you haven't tried any other USB devices like a thumb drive or a mouse, then it is also possible the Maxtor is funky.