My USB Ports died!

Factual Questions
1

I have a Dell XPS 410, bought less than six months ago.
I run Vista primarily, but also have XP SP2 (for gaming) and Ubuntu 7.10 (to “play around with”) installed, too. Triple-boot, if you will.
I have two USB ports on the front of my machine, plus six more in the back. Additionally, I have a PCI card with four more USB ports. All ports are 2.0.

I recently got a new (to me), used phone – an LG VX 8100, IIRC. It did not come with a power-cable, but did come with a USB cable. So I plugged the phone in to my computer to charge it. The phone turned out to be broken (Use Genuine Battery, it says, even though I already have one. That’s a problem for another thread, tho’.) The phone counted down from ten to one, and then powered itself off. In that ten seconds, my computer found the phone, and started installing the driver to interface with it. It did not, however, finish installing the driver, and the moment the phone turned itself off, my computer froze. Nothing I did would unfreeze it, so I did a hard reset by holding down the power button for four seconds.

Now, at that time, my USB Keyboard, USB Mouse, and USB Trackball were all plugged in to the rear panel USB plugs; and my printer and iPod were both plugged into the PCI card. When I restarted the computer, I got a “Keyboard Failure” message, but it continued to load Vista. Within Vista, the Keyboard, Mouse, and Trackball do not work at all – no lights on the keyboard’s LOCK status panel, no optical mouse light – unless I move them to the PCI card, at which point, they work just fine.

The major problem this presents is that I can no longer boot into safe mode, nor can I boot from CD, or into XP or Ubuntu, as all options require a key-press during startup. The PCI USB ports do not engage until the operating system fully loads!

My system tray recognizes a “USB Root Hub” as being faulty, with an “Unrecognized” something plugged into it. Now, My Device Manager does list 11 separate “USB Root Hub” entries, and I found out which specific hub is the problem and I’ve tried various “uninstall drivers”, “disable”, and “rollback” options with no positive outcome. I’ve left it disabled now, because the tray icon is quite annoying.

I’ve googled the problem, and the only fixes I can find are either REALLY lame (buy a new computer!), or involve booting into safe mode, which I can’t do.

I’m fairly computer-adept, as you can tell, but this problem has just got me stumped! Any help would be appreciated, and I’m happy to answer any questions so you can get more details needed.

Thanks!

2

picture of the unrecognized item, and device manager

http://flickr.com/photos/klif/2287011618/

3

my apologies for the THIRD post in a row, but here’s a better picture, full-size:

http://flickr.com/photos/klif/2287018310/sizes/o/

4

What happens if you yank the PCI card, and plug in mouse and keyboard into the native jacks, either front or back? Alternatively, does the computer have PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse? Try using those to get into safe mode.

5

There are no ps2 ports, alas.

I’ll try to yank, and see what happens.

6

Are both the phone and the cable uplugged from your PC at this point?

Remove and reseat the USB PCI card in another PCI slot and it’s likely your onboard USB ports will come back.

7

I yanked, and no change – the ports still don’t work.

Both the phone and the cable are unplugged from the BC.

I’ll reseat the PCI card into another slot, but I’m not sure why this would turn on my onboard USB ports. Still, I’ll do it.

8

Since your computer is less than a year old, yank the PCI card and tell Dell that your USB ports no longer work. Have them fix the problem. You may have fried something. I wouldn’t say anything about your adventure with the phone.

9

This is a common problem with usb only machines, something to try…

Plug in your usb keyboard, boot the machine and try to get into bios (tapping f1, f2, del, as appropriate to your system.

in most cases we have found that the keyboard worked fine in bios, but not in windows. Pronounced corrupted driver (and most likely not a warranty issue).

You should be able to either trigger your restore partition if applicable or run a repair install of windows from an appropriate windows disk which should correct the driver issue.

10

Yeah, nothing happened.

That’s what I’m thinking as a last resort. I’m backing up EVERYTHING I have onto another machine tonight while I sleep, just in case I have to do this.

I’ll try BIOS again, but I’m not sure it’ll work, given that the PCI card doesn’t engage until after Vista loads.

11

I tried the keyboard plugged in to the PCI USB ports, and jamming on F2 at the right time, and then I tried it plugged into two different onboard USB ports. No luck!

“Pronounced corrupted driver” sounds like a fancy name for I’m Screwed. Got anything else for me?

12

XPS 410 technical manual

On the off chance your BIOS USB settings have been munged by the phone glitch this jumper will reset your BIOS parameters including USB to factory default specs.

see “Clearing CMOS Settings” procedure in link above

13

Yeah, astro, I -just- came across that. All my stuff just finished backing up, so I’m trying that and another thing I came across from Dell Support.

Wish me luck.

14

It seems to have worked, the whole Resetting my CMOS thing!

Thanks, everyone, for your help. I’m quite relieved.