USB Devices Undetected

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hachi

51 posts

Master Geek

#34825 29-May-2009 23:02

Hi there,

I lent my friend my USB drive (average DSE fare - 2GB) to copy a couple of files. He pulled my USB drive out without unmounting it, and now no USB drive on his computer works. He uses an external HDD for everything, and this has basically hamstringed his use of his computer. He tried everything he found, including uninstalling and then reinstalling drivers, and it's not a conflict of drive names. We reinstalled a remix of XP Pro this evening, and it too has failed to detect USB drives (which suggests a hardware problem).

Any time a USB device is plugged it, it is detected, then not another squeak about it from the computer. The Device Manager when it's plugged in lists both my USD drive and his external as "USB device not recognized". I tried to mount my USB drive in Mac Puppy Linux (Puppy Linux), and MiniMe2008 (PCLinuxOS) and wasn't successful, though this could've been my own ineptness.

wazzageek

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#219784 30-May-2009 13:12

Have you tried a Linux Live CD? Some of the LiveCD's also have a hardware test tool that will test certain hardware types. I assume that other USB ports have been tried already.

Sounds suspicious that simply unplugging the device has killed the USB on the machine (normally the unmounting simply ensures that all writes have completed to the drive - a pull out without unmounting could end up corrupting the filesystem on the drive. That should be fixed by a reformat, however.)

Do other peripherals still work on that computer?

hachi

51 posts

Master Geek

#219922 30-May-2009 19:16

Keyboard mouse and monitor still work fine. I'll look into the hardware checking distros. But yeah, this seems bizarre.