Help needed! My 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium system no longer "sees" USB devices connected via the computer's USB 3.0 ports.
The computer is a self-assembled desktop PC with an ASRock FM2A85X Extreme4 ATX motherboard, AMD A8-5600K APU with on chip Radeon HD 7560D graphics, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 120GB SSD, and two identical 500GB 7200rpm HDDs. The USB devices usually connected via the USB 3.0 ports include a 1TB external HDD with its own power adapter, an all-in-one printer and a couple of memory card readers. Of these, only one of the card readers is a genuine USB3 device.
The system used to see them all, and now it doesn't unless I plug them into a USB 2.0 port. Problem is my computer has only two USB 2.0 interfaces, the others are all USB 3.0. And if connected via a USB3 port, the storage devices no longer show up in Windows Explorer or Disk Management. They are not faulty, though. Booting into Linux from a Knoppix Live DVD, I can see and use the memory card readers and external hard drive regardless of which port they are connected to. That suggests the problem is not hardware or BIOS related.
I'm inclined to believe the issue has to do with some Windows drivers but I am not aware of any recent updates that may have caused this. Besides, I restored the system to an earler state using a restore point, and the problem persists. Interestingly, the ServiWin utility shows some of the USB 3.0 related drivers (e.g. amdxhc.sys and amdhub30.sys) as stopped, and when I right-click them to change their status, it returns an error message saying "Error 5: access denied." OTOH if I navigate to these drivers in regedit and click Start, they both display a hexadecimal value of 3 indicating they are in fact started.
I got Microsoft Security Essentials installed and have run a malware detection test with ESET Online too, but no malware has been found. Am at a total loss now as to what I should try next.
The computer is a self-assembled desktop PC with an ASRock FM2A85X Extreme4 ATX motherboard, AMD A8-5600K APU with on chip Radeon HD 7560D graphics, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 120GB SSD, and two identical 500GB 7200rpm HDDs. The USB devices usually connected via the USB 3.0 ports include a 1TB external HDD with its own power adapter, an all-in-one printer and a couple of memory card readers. Of these, only one of the card readers is a genuine USB3 device.
The system used to see them all, and now it doesn't unless I plug them into a USB 2.0 port. Problem is my computer has only two USB 2.0 interfaces, the others are all USB 3.0. And if connected via a USB3 port, the storage devices no longer show up in Windows Explorer or Disk Management. They are not faulty, though. Booting into Linux from a Knoppix Live DVD, I can see and use the memory card readers and external hard drive regardless of which port they are connected to. That suggests the problem is not hardware or BIOS related.
I'm inclined to believe the issue has to do with some Windows drivers but I am not aware of any recent updates that may have caused this. Besides, I restored the system to an earler state using a restore point, and the problem persists. Interestingly, the ServiWin utility shows some of the USB 3.0 related drivers (e.g. amdxhc.sys and amdhub30.sys) as stopped, and when I right-click them to change their status, it returns an error message saying "Error 5: access denied." OTOH if I navigate to these drivers in regedit and click Start, they both display a hexadecimal value of 3 indicating they are in fact started.
I got Microsoft Security Essentials installed and have run a malware detection test with ESET Online too, but no malware has been found. Am at a total loss now as to what I should try next.