USB Devices randomly "Not Recognized;" lose all USB devices, Windows 8 only.

Discussion in 'Windows 8' started by Belarathon, Jan 23, 2013.

  1. Belarathon

    Belarathon MDL Senior Member

    Nov 21, 2007
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    #1 Belarathon, Jan 23, 2013
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2013
    Greetings:

    I did a cursory search on the forum, but didn't find my problem among topics. My problem is this:

    On Windows 8, from time to time, all of my USB devices suddenly stop working, and the systray notifies that my "USB devices are not recognized." A reboot rectifies the problem, but the problem happens about once or twice a week.

    Just a few weeks prior I had all of my USB devices going to a powered hub, which then was plugged into my computer. I happened to change motherboards from a Biostar 770E to an Asus M5A97 R2.0, which has plenty of USB ports. I hadn't bothered to eliminate the hub yet, and just as with the old motherboard, this one exhibited the "device not recognized" error. Ah ha, I thought! My USB hub has gone south. So I threw it in the garbage, and plugged all of my USB devices directly into the motherboard (USB 3.0 portable drive, Logitech M705 wireless mouse, Belkin Wireless adapter, printer, and Remote Wonder. So I was quite surprised today when my USB devices dumped out, and Windows messaged me that my "USB devices are not recognized." Edit: I should note that I have installed AMD chipset drivers from the Asus website, as the board was quite unstable without them. With the Biostar, I opted not to install third party chipset drivers and it ran fine without them.

    I don't recall this ever happening with Windows 7. Does anyone have any insight as to what's going on here?

    Any help appreciated.

    Regards,

    CF
     
  2. anarchist9027

    anarchist9027 MDL Expert

    Oct 30, 2010
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    Do you have your chipset drivers for Windows 8 installed? I would double check just to make sure you didn't install the ones for Windows 7 by mistake. Also I would do a BIOS reset and see what the results are.
     
  3. Belarathon

    Belarathon MDL Senior Member

    Nov 21, 2007
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    Turned out that my wireless adapter was the culprit. Apparently Windows 8 didn't "like" the drivers. I just swapped in a different adapter. Problem solved, I think.
     
  4. anarchist9027

    anarchist9027 MDL Expert

    Oct 30, 2010
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    Nice, hopefully that is that culprit.
     
  5. parapher

    parapher MDL Senior Member

    Nov 6, 2012
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    More than once over several OS releases have LAN and/or Wireless drivers made my system unstable, so it sounds right to me.
     
  6. MaSSaSlaYeR

    MaSSaSlaYeR MDL Novice

    Jan 24, 2013
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    Have you tried changing the format from FAT32 to NTFS?
     
  7. bk109

    bk109 MDL Senior Member

    Aug 12, 2012
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    I like to point out that GPU drivers (in my case AMD Catalyst ones) also caused a few headaches with Win8 - namely for some reason the first batch of Cat's screwed up internet connectivity especially for streaming audio Metro apps(ie TuneIn).