Windows 7: Restarts as soon as USB device is interacted with

Hello All

Very nice to become part of the community here. Here is my question.



If you look at my spec's I have a newly built PC. All brand new parts I ordered and put together. It has worked flawlessly in every aspect except it's USB problem. I do not understand.

Whenever I insert a USB device and try to move data either on or off of it the computer shuts off and then begins POST and restarts.

I do not understand this issue. It persists on the front ports from the case that I attached to the mobo, and the back ports physically on the mobo.

My keyboard is plugged into one of these USB ports and works fine. When I plug my WNDA3100v2 wifi antenna in to connect to the internet, it works fine. And when I say fine in both these cases that means no shutdowns. I have run it for over 48 hours to test.

But once I plug in any data storage USB device (USB thumb drive, powered external HDD, non-powered external HDD) the computer will shut down. Even to the point where I open a file in the external USB device and in the course of displaying the thumbnails of the internal files a shutdown is triggered.

I have been able to read again and again about this problem, but no solutions. Can anyone please help me before I return my mobo and try again?

Hello, and welcome!

Could you try burning an Ubuntu Live CD, and try to access the external drives from there? That will try to eliminate software problems, such as chipset driver issues.

Download | Ubuntu

I will try that right away. I have also been suggested to do a clean install of 7 so I can read the event logs about system instability before I load any application files. So I can have a clean event history to work from. I will also get a dump of HijackThis information once I have the clean install done and post my PC information to further analyze the problem.

Thank you in advance for your help ;D

I grabbed the Ubuntu Live CD and launched it. As in changed my boot order to boot from CD/DVD Drive first.

Ubuntu loaded and I opted not to install, but to just run live.

Once the OS loaded, I attempted to recreate my problem to no avail. It is not powering off my machine. It can read from externals, write to/from without any reboots or issues.

What does this mean that my Windows 7 x64 Ultimate powers off and Ubuntu doesn't??

How can this help me solve my issue?

Thank you in advance.

That makes it seem like a software issue in Windows; have you tried updating/reinstalling your USB controller drivers?

My motherboard from Asus (P7H57D-V EVO) came with a driver disk. It sure updated a lot of drivers! I (assume) it updated all the USB drivers (to include the 3.0 it supports).

The original USB drivers before I installed the driver disk were the Windows 7 drivers that came with my install. It was a modern install version of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Feb).

In the case of both Windows 7 USB drivers, the issue persisted. With both the beginning Windows 7 & also (if it did install an update for 2.0) with the driver disk.

So you are saying I should try to update the USB drivers from within Windows with the newest drivers from Microsoft?

*****EDIT

Loaded Windows 7 and attempted to updated USB Drivers via the internet. In every case Windows 7 said "The best driver software for your device is already installed --- Windows has determined the driver for your device is up to date."

In a few cases (like the aforementioned 3.0 slots) there was the ability to roll back drivers. So a few were installed with the driver disk.

You might try uninstalling the drivers and then rebooting; then Windows will reinstall them from its driver store.

Do you have the problem now, with the fresh install?

You have two separate USB controllers: one is the Intel USB 2.0 controller, and the other is a NEC USB 3.0 controller; the USB 3.0 ports are blue.

If you are still having problems, try both USB controllers out.