Question Strange USB issue after mistake

JediPianist

Distinguished
Feb 19, 2013
5
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18,510
Hey all,

So, I'm an idiot. I was replacing my power supply because the old one was was faulty (free RMA ftw), and in order to get some of the cables through the PC I yanked on one. In doing so, I accidentally also pulled the case USB connecter out of the MOBO, and broke several pins. I know that I cannot use the case's front USB ports, and I don't want to buy an entirely new MOBO just for that.

However, since this happened my MOBO USB ports on the back of the PC have been having a strange issue. They periodically seem to cycle power, disconnecting and reconnecting the things connected to them. It only appears to affect the top two of them, but it's quite annoying because for work I have so much stuff connected that it takes up every single USB port. I tried going in the device manager and turning off the power saving mode, and that did nothing, and uninstalling and reinstalling the USB drivers hasn't fixed it either.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what this could be or how to fix it? I really don't think that my dumb mistake should've broken these ports too, but if anyone has a theory, I would much appreciate it.
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
The area where you yanked the connector for the front panels, see if some pins are making contact. You can try reinstalling your chipset/USB drivers and see if that alleviates the problem. Also, by yank did you yank every connector on the board(including the EPS connector)?

Make and model of your motherboard? An image of the damage could helps us two fold.
 
You can always buy a pcie usb adapter card that gives you a bunch of usb3.0 ports on the rear.
To reuse your front usb ports some such cards may have a internal usb 3.0 connection.

Another option is to use a powered usb hub which can place a number of usb ports on your desktop.
I use one like this to place my mouse usb transmitter closer to the mouse.
https://www.amazon.com/Wavlink-Powered-Charging-Individual-Switches/dp/B0819RPSMY