Windows 7 - Some USB devices not working

Yesterday afternoon, my laptop suddenly stopped recognizing all my USB devices for no apparent reason. I made no changes to my system configuration, and there was nothing else happened that I'm aware of that would have led to this. Anytime I'd plug in any of my USB devices (an external hard drive, a thumb drive, either of two joysticks, or my MP3 player) I'd get the "USB Device Not Recognized" balloon and it'd show up as "Unknown Device" with a yellow-triangle-exclamation-mark in Devices and Printers. I tried a System Restore to a restore point from a week ago, when everything was working fine. Now, my thumb drive works but nothing else does. I've also turned off USB selective suspend, but still to no avail. Any thoughts?

Hello Dan, and welcome to Seven Forums!

It sounds like you may need to update some drivers. Assuming you are able to connect to the internet:

There are many ways to go about this. You can choose to do this manually or automatically. Manually ensures that you hold more control over your system and you can update whenever you want, and automatically ensures that you are not bothered by the trivial occurances that go on in a computer.

Automatically: Use this tutorial - Device Installation Settings - and follow the steps to "Allow Device Drivers and Information to be Installed". After that, check for updates, and your drivers will be listed in the optional updates section.

Manually: There are many ways to do this, such as visiting the support - drivers section of your computer's (or computer part's) manufaturer's website and downloading them. Or you can go into 'device manager' and 'devices and printers', click any driver with a yellow exclaimation next to it, right click it, and click update driver.

Neither method comes up with anything. The "automatic updates" simply shows that no updates are available, and the manual method says "The best driver software for your device is already installed--Windows has determined the driver software for your device is up to date," yet in fact it remains listed as an "unknown device" and does not work.

Hello Dan, Try going to the lappy's specs page and finding the drivers/utilites page and download them from there. Sometimes Windows update is quirky and can't fine the correct drivers. This is especially true for USB3.0 and graphics drivers.
If that fails, go to the Device manager and try to determine what USB controller you have, Intel, Marvell, Etron, etc and google for it.

Are you safely removing it by clicking the 'remove hardware icon'? Do you have all windows important updates installed?

Try plugging it in, restarting, and see how it is after that. Also, Fill out your specs on the forum --> Profile - this tool --> System Info - See Your System Specs may help you with that. We will need this info!

They all say my drivers (for the USB controller itself, obviously not for the individual hardware plugged in to it) are up to date.

For the storage devices, yes--though note that my USB thumb drive works fine. It's the external hard drive, joysticks, and MP3 player that are having problems. Not at the moment. I live in the boonies and only have dialup, so doing updates usually has to wait until I'm at school--there's 300 MB queued for tomorrow. Will do.

Get to a command prompt (cmd.exe) as administrator (search box: cmd, right-click "Run As Adminstrator"). Leave this cmd prompt window open for the duration of testing.

Once there, via the "CD" command, put yourself in a directory in which you can save a file.

Then, from the command line prompt, enter these 2 commands. First command should say "command was successful". 2nd one should provide 20 or so lines of output and show it is "running".

logman start myusb -p Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-PnP 0x7ffff -bs 64 -nb 10 50 -mode Circular -max 20 -o myusb.etl -ets

logman myusb -ets


Now plug in and remove some USB devices that aren't working.

Once you are done with that, from the command prompt:

logman stop myusb -ets


If you now do a DIR command, you should see a myusb.etl file in your directory.

Now, run this command:

tracerpt myusb.etl -o dumpfile.csv -of CSV

ATTACH the dumpfile.csv to a new post.

Searching elsewhere, it was suggested that I unplug my battery and the power cable, let it sit (I presume to let some capacitors discharge), and then start it back up. Everything's working fine now.

Good to hear Dan.