- Mar 31, 2015
- 102
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I recently bought a pretty good LGA775 system for $15, and I'm planning to fix it up. The main reason why I liked it so much is that the motherboard is fairly high-end for the measly $15 that I paid for the entire system. The previous owner said that the power button didn't work, but other than that, everything else worked. Thought it would be a fairly easy fix, but I have ran into major problems trying to get USB to work.
The first thing that I noticed is that the PC came with a USB PCI card. Sure they might have installed it just for more USB ports, but it was still suspicious. Booted up the system and got it to work, until I tried to boot from USB. Nothing happened.
So I thought that maybe the motherboard was (for some reason) incapable of booting from USB. It's not even that old though, as I have been able to boot from USB on much, much older systems. Then, I tried the USB ports on the PCI card, and it still didn't boot. Apparently the BIOS doesn't like dealing with the USB card because even USB keyboards plugged into the card won't work until Windows boots up.
But the onboard USB ports never work, even with Windows booted up. Tried installing drivers, still nothing. Cleared the CMOS, nothing. Flashed the BIOS to the newest version, nothing. There isn't any visible damage to the traces near the I/O other than a very tiny scratch right next to the PCI-e slot, but that only scraped the coating on the PCB. I'm sure it didn't cut a trace or anything.
So I really have no clue what else to try. At this point, I'm either thinking that the USB controller is fried or there's something really weird going on with the hardware. Perhaps the previous owner tried to connect USB to the IE1394 header, even though there weren't any USB ports on the front panel of the case. Any suggestions?
Details:
Motherboard - ASUS P5N-E SLI (nForce 650i SLI)
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 @ 2.8GHz
RAM - 4GB DDR2-800 dual-channel
GPU - nVidia Quadro FX-1700
The first thing that I noticed is that the PC came with a USB PCI card. Sure they might have installed it just for more USB ports, but it was still suspicious. Booted up the system and got it to work, until I tried to boot from USB. Nothing happened.
So I thought that maybe the motherboard was (for some reason) incapable of booting from USB. It's not even that old though, as I have been able to boot from USB on much, much older systems. Then, I tried the USB ports on the PCI card, and it still didn't boot. Apparently the BIOS doesn't like dealing with the USB card because even USB keyboards plugged into the card won't work until Windows boots up.
But the onboard USB ports never work, even with Windows booted up. Tried installing drivers, still nothing. Cleared the CMOS, nothing. Flashed the BIOS to the newest version, nothing. There isn't any visible damage to the traces near the I/O other than a very tiny scratch right next to the PCI-e slot, but that only scraped the coating on the PCB. I'm sure it didn't cut a trace or anything.
So I really have no clue what else to try. At this point, I'm either thinking that the USB controller is fried or there's something really weird going on with the hardware. Perhaps the previous owner tried to connect USB to the IE1394 header, even though there weren't any USB ports on the front panel of the case. Any suggestions?
Details:
Motherboard - ASUS P5N-E SLI (nForce 650i SLI)
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 @ 2.8GHz
RAM - 4GB DDR2-800 dual-channel
GPU - nVidia Quadro FX-1700
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