No USB power at all either in Win or Linux

[woodbender]

I've done a search in the forums here. Didn't find anything glaringly obvious right away,.. so,..

A friend of mine swapped out the memory on a Dell Inspiron Laptop 1150 without removing the battery first. He plopped in the new memory and booted it up and immediately found he had no USB ports any more.

BIOS setup shows the USB is enabled. Windows Device Mgr shows no conflicts or disabled devices. Plugging in an optical mouse shows no power getting to the red light (the mouse actually does work on my own machine).

Booting the laptop with a Linux rescue disk brings no USB device power either and no mouse activity. So this is not a Windows driver issue.

Those are my observations;
Is this an onboard USB controller that got whacked from not pulling the battery?

Second Question; if that might not be the case,..

Is it possible to reset the system BIOS and force it to see the USB ports? The CMOS battery is soldered on in that model so is there a Mboard jumper that can be pulled to clear the BIOS?

 

[buwish]

Usually to kick start the USB ports, you can try updating the chipset or simply just re-installing it. It has worked for me in the past.

 

[woodbender]

Usually to kick start the USB ports, you can try updating the chipset or simply just re-installing it. It has worked for me in the past.

Okay thanks for the quick reply. Would this also handle the ports not powering any devices at all? Or would this re-enable the system BIOS to "see" the ports again? Just a curiosity.

I'll track down your advice and see what that does.

Thanks!

 

[buwish]

Yes, it should take care of all the ports. The USB controllers are tied into the chipset, at least to a degree, which is why it should get the BIOS, etc... to "see" all ports again.

 

[woodbender]

Yes, it should take care of all the ports. The USB controllers are tied into the chipset, at least to a degree, which is why it should get the BIOS, etc... to "see" all ports again.

Awesome - and thanks again for such a quick reply.

 

[woodbender]

We can call this closed. I installed a BIOS upgrade from intel with no resolve to the issue. But it was a great suggestion and one that I will remember for the future.

 

[woodbender]

Best answer selected by woodbender.