First post, by EdmondDantes
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So I had two comps that didn't recognize front USB ports even when said ports were hooked up to the motherboard. One was my Epox-8KTA board, which I thought this behavior was normal since that board was so old (and it was running Win98SE anyway) but recently it happened again on that Dell GX260 I have which was unusual because, for awhile, it saw front USB panels just fine, but then suddenly it stopped seeing them.
Now, the front panel is hooked up with one of these doohickeys which you'll see also has a headphone jack.... the headphone jack works just fine, but the USB ports do not.
I've tried XP and a version of Linux which has always recognized these USB ports before, completely disconnecting my current hard drive to make sure its not the OS (actually rehooking up a different HD which had an XP install where the ports worked). So I'm convinced its a BIOS problem.
The only thing I can think is... when I got this Dell its bios version was A05, I upgraded it to A06 and I'm suspecting that might have something to do with the issue, but I dunno how to revert back to A05.
As for options in the BIOS... the only BIOS screens that seem relevant are... one lets you select whether USB ports (and an option for emulation) are on at all (in my case, both ARE, though I've deactivated the emulation one before just to test) and another one that lets you select what IRQ settings they use (a few of them are, for reasons unknown to me, forced to share their IRQ with my video and sound card--when I change them it automatically makes those match--so I'm not sure what the deal is, but this has always been the case.
Those are the only two parts of the Dell GX260's setup that mention USB at all.
Anyway, this is more of a curiosity rather than a real issue, since I found a workaround (plugging an extension cord into one of the back USB ports and keeping the other end up front, since the ones on the back *always* work) but it just bothers me that the front jacks used to work and now don't and I see no logical cause for it.