It's possible that there is a second cable that connects to the pins on the back of the little board and to a USB header on the board. I can see some pins in that photo.

It won't be a USB header unless there is a missing pin to account for the key pin. Google "usb motherboard key" to see what it looks like.

It won't be a USB header unless there is a missing pin to account for the key pin.

Older mainboards had no key pin on the USB header. Before, there were even two different pin-outs for the header and the key pin was added when the pin-out was normalised.

That's right, I've had to bend pins out of the way to connect newer USB cables to some older hardware.

derSammler wrote:

It won't be a USB header unless there is a missing pin to account for the key pin.

Older mainboards had no key pin on the USB header. Before, there were even two different pin-outs for the header and the key pin was added when the pin-out was normalised.

Some older motherboards. My Asus TXP4 and P55T2P4 both have standard layout nine pin USB headers on them. But other AT boards I've had used proprietary setups that required a volt meter to be sure you were getting the right wire on the right pin. I had a Chaintech 5AGM2 that had tiny USB pins - the only thing I found to fit them (since I did not have, and wasn't going to buy, Chaintech's expensive USB adapter) were some tiny five pin connectors salvaged out of a dead CDROM. I had to trim these to fit, then solder the wires to a standard USB adapter. This sort of difficulty with I/O is a major reason why ATX became the runaway standard after it was introduced.

Also be aware of some boards that have a non-standard USB header pinout. It looks the same as a modern layout, but the pin assignments are switched around, and sometimes even reversed on the opposite row. I had to re-pin my front panel USB connector to work with my Abit VT6X4 motherboard.

My Dell GX260 mobo has a unique pin layout--there is just one big rectangle marked "front panel" which you plug a single cable (its similar to how IDE cables work) with all the front panel stuff into. That's what's making it weird for me as I can't possibly see how I could've "forgotten to plug something in" when by design, you plug everything in at once.

The doohickey in question takes up the full front panel connector. I'm gonna check and make sure I didn't plug it in backwards or something. But again its weird, because I would think if I didn't then none of the front panel stuff would work, but again the speaker jack works, and they're on exactly the same green PCB thing as the USB ports.

On my Epox-8KTA, I always plugged the clearly marked "front USB" cables into the part of the motherboard that, again, is clearly marked "front USB," but they still never worked. But that's the board that I mentioned a month ago turned out to have bad caps so maybe that's why those didn't work. The Dell is considerably more of a mystery to me.