Hello everyone! I was hoping that some of you would be able to help me diagnose a most serious error with my USB ports.

I have both an external hard drive and a Zune media player. Both of them hooked up to my computer and worked fine before, showing up in Windows Explorer, system telling me I had just connected them, etc. This was the same on any USB port I used.

Today, however, when I went to transfer files to my external hard drive, my system did not give me the ding-a-ling sound I usually got when I hooked it up. I went into Windows Explorer and, you got it, no luck. No drive anywhere. I couldn't access it by manually typing in the drive letter, either.

Then, hoping it was only the external hard drive driver that was messed up, I hooked up my Zune, which is a WPD, and the same thing happened. No ding-a-ling, no showing up in Explorer. Nothing.

I am personnally stumped as to what can be causing this. Power is still going to the USB ports because it can still power my chill pad via USB. The only thing that comes to mind is that I installed Gears of War yesterday and it made me install 2 drivers with it, one being for an AMD Athlon processor (I have a Turion64), and one for something else. I know for a fact, though, that neither of them had to do with USB ports.

Any ideas on what could be making my computer suddenly stop recognizing USB device even though there is power to them? HELP! (Please)

Try opening the run box and typing devmgmt.msc. Tell us if there are any icons with little yellow or red dots by them.

Do as Idontwantspam said. If everything looks normal, rather, if everything looks opposite to what Idontwantspam described above, then your USB ports might have somehow fried themselves (short circuited - it happened to me). In either case, try uninstalling the USB devices, disabling/re-enabling them in the BIOS, etc. If that doesn't work, you'll need to get yourself a PCI USB 2.0 card.

The driver for the USB ports had been corrupted. All I had to do was uninstall and reinstall it. It was Gears of War that had messed it up.

Thanksfor the suggestions though!