Lost all drives and USB ports

allan gould · #1 13-01-2009, 07:54 PM

Can someone help me. Ive suddenly lost the ability to access all usb ports or plug in drives and I cant see why. Cant acess CD rom drive either. I can see anything wrong in the system. What should I check for.
Any help for a computer nerd would be appreciated. The C drive is OK.

DeanoNZL (Adrian) · #2 13-01-2009, 08:05 PM

Hi Allan,
What OS are you on? .
Are you able to restart your machine, could just be a glitch.
Let me know.

allan gould · #3 13-01-2009, 08:22 PM

Running XP SP2. Have tried rebooting to no avail. When I try to acess the drive it says its unavailable and acess denied

acropolite (Phil) · #4 13-01-2009, 08:41 PM

You could start by clicking on the START button, then Right click on my computer, select properties then select the hardware tab, click on the device manager button and check to see whether the USB devices are listed or not and whether drivers are loaded. It may be that for some reason the service has stopped or the driver has accidentally been moved/corrupted. I've also seen occasions where a device is unplugged without using "safely remove hardware" from the systray and nothing will show on the USB port. One particular Cannon camera has a habit of tying up the USB ports on one of our machines at work.

Gama · #5 14-01-2009, 02:11 AM

Try a restore to a day ago.

Theo

Vartigy · #6 21-01-2009, 09:07 AM

When all else fails... it's worth checking on your PSU (Power Supply Unit) and eventually maybe your M/B(motherboard).

I've recently been through a similar situation.
First, USB's failed. Then all of a sudden began having troubles booting system up, then it got to the point where I couldn't read 1 of my HDDs, then neither would work.
I instantly thought it was HDD failure, all signs pointed to that.
But every check I ran in BIOS indicated my HDDs were still there.
But for voltage return checks, seemed as though that my HDDs weren't recieving nuff power to run.
So then I thought PSU was failing. Changed that out, fixed it for about 5 hrs, then the problems got worse.
It ended up being the M/B that was dying on me. And it was only that segment on the board, but it was enough for it to become a write-off.

So after buying a new M/B, new CPU, and a new PSU, I found out that my HDDs were fine, USB were working again, and I've now got a faster better computer than I had before.... *groan*... expensive exercise.

Hope you don't have a similar issue. But when things start failing regarding hardware, especially if BSOD's (Blue Screen of Death) comes up, then it's highly likely you're in for an upgrading episode.

allan gould · #7 21-01-2009, 09:14 AM

Fixed it - some program altered all or some registry entries. Changed them back and its OK now thanks for eyeryones efforts.

h0ughy (David) · #8 21-01-2009, 09:53 AM

one thing allan - you said you were running sp2 - you might need to get sp3

JethroB76 (Jeff) · #9 21-01-2009, 10:57 AM

I reckon Vista is somehow to blame for this problem

toryglen-boy (Duncan) · #10 21-01-2009, 03:59 PM

sometimes the USB 2.0 bus is assigned the same IRQ in the BIOS as the IDE controller, if an optical drive etc. is EIDE then this can cause issues with devices usually on the same IRQ (usually IRQ11 i think) this shows itself as "your device failed to install correctly" when plugging in a USB drive, the best way to get around this, is to remove the USB hub from Device Manager in Windows, then search for new hardware, on modern motherboards this is usually enough to detec the hub, reinstall it, and wipe the status of attached drives in the process, all without rebooting.

happy trails