USB device not recognized - Help!

[idgat]

This thread seems to have gotten a little off track from the original subject header.

The issue has not been the identification of the USB ports themselves, per se, but in fact the identification of devices attached to USB ports ... the USB ports appear as "working" in Windows, however any device attached to the port is not recognised. This is a differnt issue from some of the above responses.

Seems to be a "trait" of 5xxx model ACER lap[tops. Althpoigh I posted my solutions above, it ahse happened to my ACER 5100 laptop again. This time, my previous solution failed miseably. The USB ports appears as funtioning in the Windows Device Manager - i.e. there is nothing wrong with the ports themselves. However, as soon as any device is attached (mouse/keyboard, w/less mouse/keyboard, USB stick, USB external HDD, et al), the error message appears that the device is not recognised.

Temp solution has been to use a USB port PCMCIA card - works sometimes, fails others.

 

[weecosse]

Can someone tell me how to find where the RC1 file is on my PC?

 

[idgat]

Can someone tell me how to find where the RC1 file is on my PC?

Details please??

RC1 usually refers to the version of Windows 7 (Release Candidate 1) that was made available for public downloading and testing.

From March 1 2010, any computers running W7 RC1 would shut down every 2 hours. This version is due to expire completely from 1 June 2010.

 

[RayTheRat]

This USB device thing is just about to send me over the event horizon. Not only USB but 1394 Firewire, too.

This is probably gonna be long, but I'm tryin to include a pertinent data. The basic configuration is in my sig.

Win 7 Pro, Build 7600, 64 bit.
16 Gig buffered Ram
60 GB SSD (OS only)
5.5 TB internal SATA, all internal and external drives are Western Digital.

I've got a lot of USB devices on my "Dreadnought"
Dreadnought

2 printers
HP 5200
Epson P1400

Graphics tablet (Wacom Bamboo)

3 WD 1TB external drives

Saitek keyboard (thank God that works)

2 CF card readers
RocketFish CF & SD
Dynex CF SD and about every other kinda card

Epson V500 Scanner

The two biggest problems are getting the system to recognize the disk drives and CF card readers. I'm a photographer and I'm always pulling the CF card from one of my Canon DSLRs and popping it into one of the 2 readers (I usually keep one with my laptop for when I'm on the road.) so that I can transfer photos to an internal drive for storage and editing.

Up until yesterday, it was a 50/50 chance of getting the externals or card readers to be recognized by the OS. But then they just quit working altogether.

Before this leads anyone into jumping to conclusions, I'll mentioned that I've done some tweaking on the system to improve performance and it's helped. Some folks might jump to the conclusion that my "tweaking" (the system software type, not the other type) caused the problems but I don't think so. I figger 45 years in the computer business either makes me qualified to do this or labels me as a raving lunatic. Maybe both. But there was no correlation between the registry tweaks I'd made and the problems with the USB storage devices that I could identify.

So when I'd shot a few photos and wanted to prepare one of 'em for my
http://www.raythe rat.com Photoblog. So I pulled the CF card out, slid into one of the readers (RocketFish) and...nothing. I tried the other reader (one that had seemed flaky, even on XP) and nothing there.

Other USB devices, like printers and graphics tablet didn't seem to be a problem.

To make a long story short, after exhausting just about every other option, I ended up doing a Repair Install on the box before I could get it to recognize one of the card readers.

The Repair Install took about 8 hours. About 6 hours into it I finally got so frustrated with the time it was taking that I removed the power cables from the external drives. (The card readers weren't connected. I suppose I shouldn't have had the externals connected, either.) I got a nasty-gram stating that I'd lost one file which wasn't a big deal. It was a backup of a backup. Finally, after a whole lotta cussin and frettin, the install completed. But when the box came back to life, I realized that the external hard drives weren't recognized. I had to reboot with one of 'em connected, then reboot with 2, and so on. I rebooted so many times I lost track of exactly how this went, but the gist of it is that I had to bring one of the externals online at a time, then reboot with it and the next one connected and eventually I was able to see all of 'em.

Another thing I verified was if I had the card reader plugged into one of the USB connectors on the front of the case (it's a Cooler Master HAF 932) the boot process would take forever (and maybe longer than that) while attempting to recognize ANY USB storage device that was connected.

FINALLY the box is running with this configuration:
All 3 external drives are daisy-chained to 1 port on the Firewire controller.
RocketFish CF reader connected to one of the 4 front panel USB ports.
All other USB devices are connected to the USB ports on the mobo, with a 1:3 expander that only has the graphics tablet and Saitek keyboard. Those are working fine. I can also connect my Android phone to a USB port and charge it or use it as a USB device and transfer files back and forth.

I've tested both printers, the scanner and the graphics tablet. All are working.

It appears that I had 1 bad Firewire cable and apparently the Dynex card reader is junk.

I don't have too many conclusions except that once I daisy chained the Firewire drives instead of running 'em each on their own port at the controller card they seemed to work better. We'll see after the reboot.

Reboot complete. all storage devices and other USB devices functional. Firewire daisy chaining appears to be functional

The Dynex Card Reader is going just went into the trashcan. I'll get another one for my laptop as I head out of town to shoot a car show in a coupla hours.

I just plugged 4 USB thumb drives into the front-panel connectors and they all came up fairly quickly. I guess this is about the best I've ever had things working.

If you've hung in with this whole narrative, you're probably about as mentally exhausted as I am. The system is working...but will it remain stable? I don't know. I'll shut it down until I get back from 4 days of photo shoots on the road.

What I'd REALLY like to find is a comprehensive USB device manager. One that can see ALL devices connected to USB ports rather than just "mass storage" devices. Does such a thing exist? I haven't been able to find one.

I don't know if this can be helpful to anyone, but for me, it seems to demonstrate that you CAN get from here to there eventually (to quote the title of an old Steppenwolf song) if you take the time and fight one issue at a time...and don't rule out faulty hardware.

hth.

 

[hbar]

EDIT: Do not follow this method. See below

I am having a similar problem to the original poster. I have a USB thumb drive that I use at work. I have been using it for several months and have never had a problem. Today, I inserted it into my laptop and I got the "Unrecognized USB device" error. The drive has an access LED which did not light up. I went into Control Panel -> Device Manager -> USB controllers and disabled the "Unrecognized" device, and then enabled it. Did not work. I then disabled it and unplugged my flash drive, and then plugged it back in. The device manager now recognizes it and the access LED is on, but it does not appear in Windows Explorer.

I have an ASUS K61IC laptop with Windows 7 home Pro 64 bit with automatic updates on.

It does have a NVIDIA display adapter, but I don't know about the USB adapter.

The flash drive is recognized in a different XP laptop.

EDIT: Do not do this! I retested the drive in the XP computer, and it does come up in Windows Explorer, but when you click on it you get a message "Please insert a disk into drive F:". I think I just de-formatted my flash drive...

 

[RayTheRat]

Ouch! I hope ya didn't. Matter of fact, I'm almost sure you didn't. This is the symptom I got every time things would start to go silly. Power off the laptop completely. Not just hibernate, but complete power down.

Then put the thumb drive in the USB port and fire it up again. Unless it hangs in the BIOS, it should come up and read it.

By the time you read this I'm sure you will have tried it in another machine and found it to be ok. (I got my fingers crossed for ya.)

 

[hbar]

Nope, powered down and up, still not working. And the other computer no longer recognizes the drive either. Luckily, there was nothing on it that wasn't backed up somewhere, but I can't seem to get it working again.

In Device Manager, it shows up under USB controllers as a USB Mass Storage Device, and it shows up under Disk Drives as a USB Device, but if I go to properties -> Volumes, nothing is listed.

In Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management it shows up as a disk with no media and capacity of 0 MB.

Anyway, I can always get another USB drive, and all the data was backed up. I just hope Microsoft fixes whatever I did wrong so no one else goes through it.

 

[weecosse]

I managed to get my problem fixed by doing this: Go to Control Panel; then to System and Security - find and fix problems; Programs - run programs made for previous versions of Windows; Troubleshhot and help prevent computer problems and click on Next; Select your TomTom program then Next; then Test compatibility settings from the programs; click on next. When I did this is brought up previous versions os Windows. I chose Windows Vista and it worked.

 

[TMAce]

Hey guys, I have this USB problem too! I've built this new computer 2 days ago, all the old peripherals have worked fine (from my old computer, which was in the days of XP) but this morning nothing is working except the mouse and internet dongle... both my keyboard, PSP and USB stick say they are not recognised, and now the USB stick and Keyboard are no longer working on other computers! Any help would be great

 

[RayTheRat]

I've finally been able to work around this problem and in explaining maybe it'll provide some insight to where the problem lies.

The place where the problem became most frustrating was when I'd try to us a Compact Flash card reader to load photos from the cards to the hard drives. I'm a photographer so I do this quite often. I found that I could only use a simple card reader (ie: non-powered, unbuffered) once after a clean boot. And even sometimes that didn't work.

What worked most reliably was plugging the camera directly in to the desktop (same problem with laptop, but solution won't work) and allowing its embedded system to communicate with the USB subsystem. This worked without fail. (See a pattern here?)

I finally bought a 3.5" card reader that I plugged directly into the mobo on the desktop. That was 2 weeks ago. I haven't had a problem with it recognizing a card yet.

This seems to say that some "intelligent" controller is required to handle recognition of a new USB device and that "plug and play" doesn't work very well when a certain level of complexity is achieved within the USB subsystem (I have a hub for 3 printers, KB and mouse, and a couple of other USB devices connected)

I've been led to believe that there's no limit (well, within reason) to the number of USB devices that one can use on a given system. I'm beginning to question that.

The only drawback to this is at boot time when USB0 is searched for, even though there's no card in the reader. The boot process hangs, apparently on a timeout value, waiting for it to find a card or other device. Once past that, it works very well...if you don't mind a card reader sitting on the desk, since I'm out of 3.5" mounting slots.

My conclusion? USB ain't as universal as the computer industry would like us to believe. Furthermore, Microsoft has been silent on this issue as well as several others. Is it on a list of problems attributed to "outside hardware vendors" or other non MS entities and therefore ignored? I don't know. All I know is I'm gonna have to transfer all my files to my laptop directly from my camera (I'll use a spare camera) on the salt flats over the next several months to avoid the problems I had last year.

 

[ripmaster]

Solved:
I searched the web endlessly for answers and solutions, i tried all and none worked.

I took a change and sent my clients motherboard back to the supplier (as it was 6 months old and still under warranty - MSI G31 - ) and told them the USB ports are malfuntioning. With out them testing the board they replaced it with a new one.
I placed the board in the box (didn't need to update or install any drivers because it was the same chipset as the previous motherboard) and whala... all the USB ports worked again.

Replace your motherboard if problem presists.

 

[Bill Wilson]

I also suffered from win7 not rcognizing a 4gig thumb drive. The solution was to plug it into an external hdd sata docking station with card & usb sockets, it then functioned perfectly

 

[RayTheRat]

It's not a mobo issue...not unless I have 4 computers, all of different brand and vintage...and OS: two on 7 and two on XP that exhibit the same problem. It's a known issue. Windows USB handling is pretty good, but it requires an intelligent controller for storage devices. Just like Bill W (hi, friend) I had to buy an external controller for my main system and then connect my cameras directly to my laptop to unload the photos (Canon 7D, 40D and 20D) rather than using a "dumb" card reader.

I'm sniffing around the market for a new laptop and one of the requirements is a FireWire port so I can use an external FW reader (which work fine...zero problems switching cards with them) and DVD burner.

The problem is inside Windows and its handling of USB storage devices. With the proliferation of thumb drives and other removable media, it's time for this issue to be resolved.

 

[Triumph]

USB Device not recognised

I have exactly the same problem as many others with the usb device not recognized message constantly popping up on screen. Brand new computer with fresh install of Windows 7. Been running for a few months with no problems, then all of a sudden this message keeps popping up relentlessly. My BIOS is up to date and the M/B chip set drivers are up to date. I have tried every remedy I have seen posted here and the problem persists. This problem happens even when every usb device is disconnected from the machine, including keyboard and mouse! I am beginning to question the quality and value of buying Windows 7 if this is the performance it delivers!

 

[blakjustice30]

Fixed!

I had this same issue, I had to uninstall all USB ports, Plug in each USB device individually and let windows reinstall them one by one.
*Control Panel-Device manager-Universal Serial BUS Controllers USB-
-Uninstall all Root hub & USB storage devices...Then Windows will reinstall them when you plug in each device separately. i hope this works.

 

[Triumph]

USB Device not recognised

Tried all the advice on this forum and it cures the problem for about 10 minutes!

 

[Triumph]

More developments; computer seemed to cure itself for awhile, when it went for several hours without the message appearing. Now it has come back. Also, when computer is put into sleep mode, it immediately wakes up again. Hmmm. Why is Microsoft so silent on this problem?

 

[robmar0se]

usb recognition probs

I have had 2 PCs with USB problems under windows 7. Both were caused by faulty memeory card readers. In one case the the card reader had caused the usb pci-e card to burn out, in the other case simply unplugging the memory card reader from the motherboard, the USB slots worked.

Obviously there is no single cause for these USB probs, so hope this helps someone.

 

[Megadin]

random try

try this step:
1. go to computer icon and right click, choose ' manage ' . if the desktop doesn't have my computer icon, press windows(flag one), there's computer written there.
2. after click manage, under system tools, click device manager.
3. here you can see 'computer', 'disk drives', 'dvd/rom', 'keyboard', 'monitors' and so on.
4. find 'universal serial buses. double click it and there's some usb does not recognized. (as for my laptop acer, i only have 2 USB plug. which mean only 2 icon does not recognized). there's two icon signed with an exclamation mark there.
5. at that icon, right click it and click 'update driver software'.
6. click ' browse my computer for driver software'.
7. click ' let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer. '
8. here, just click next, since the driver already installed on your computer.
9. after finished update, you can see the icon change same like the rest.
10.update the rest using the same step.

hope this helps.

 

[lvladimir]

Hi guys!
I am trying to connect my bluetooth Parrot minikit from the car to 3 different computers with different operation system (Win 7 Ultimate x64 and x86, Windows XP 32-bit) but all of them having the same warning "USB Device not Recognized"). So reinstalling or reparing the OS is not an issue. Who could help?