USB Port Destroys Devices

Q

Queuecumber

Geek Trainee
Hello,

I have a strange situation. I built my computer from the ground up with a asus 750i sli motherboard. I was never able to get the front USB ports working, but I didnt think anything of it, only a minor inconvenience.

The other day, however, my friend plugged his 1TB external hard drive into the front USB port thinking it would work, and of course it didnt. Now the drive wont work on any usb port on any computer. On a hunch, I tried the front USB port with two good USB thumb drives. Both worked fine, but after plugging them in they dont work at all.

My question is twofold.

1. Can I fix this? if so how?
2. Can I fix my/my friends drives? if so how?

Note: that none of the drives are visible in the windows device manager, nor are they visible from /dev directory under debian linux, its almost as though they are not connected.

Thanks a lot,
Max Ehrlich
 
for one - I have seen this kind of weird behavior of front USB ports, for example, plugging in anything in those ports, would cause the PC to restart. But that was an 4-year old office desktop, so not a surprise there. Old hardware prob.

My suggestion would be to check the case connection wires to the motherboard once again. Maybe you wired it incorrectly (if you put the hardware together yourself). Take the motherboard manual. I recently built a new system myself and making the front ports to work is always a pain. I think that if you don't plug in the GND (grounding?) wire, it may create a power surge or something (also, mixing + with - can do things like that...)
 
if the USB port is damaging devices, then there's a good chance that the wires are backwards and the + and - are reversed as well as the data bus and the ground. Possibly bad headers on the motherboard itself, which would be good for an RMA but it's probably too late for that now, so I would just put some good old black tape over the front panel ports lol
 
Hi, Jewfro is right. When you've extended the bus from the usb header are they just a single block connector or multiple single connectors labled up e.g. +5 (1) + 5 (2) etc?
There are two ports per header so basically should go like this:

+5 (1) +5 (2)
d- (1) d- (2)
d+ (1) d+ (2)
ground (1) ground (2)

I would also recommend a bios update incase the problem is with the controller itself.
 
or maby you pluged the front pannel usb wires into firewire pins... it happened to me as well
 
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