So I had problems with my pc at work for a long time. Blasted thing wouldn’t allow any USB storage devices to work, such as my portable external hdd or USB keys.Whenever I plugged my hdd in, the broken USB icon would show on the taskbar with the balloon message “USB Device Not Recognized”. Very annoying cause I had alot of eBooks etc on the hdd that I couldn’t access.

Nothing was wrong with the drive, as it worked on every other computer. I had admin access to the machine, which runs WinXP Corp. Tried everything from reinstalling USB drivers, uninstalling hardware in Device Manager etc to no avail.

So I gave up and just left it for a couple of weeks, and yesterday I wanted to do a search on google for something, and IE’s autocomplete came up with the term I used before relating to this. My trigger happy finger on the Enter key fired off this search by accident, and a couple of new entries from some forum came up.

One of the guys basically said he powered off the computer, pulled out the plug from the socket, and left it for half an hour. When he powered everything back on, his USB drive got recognised.

I had little faith, but left with no further options, and nothing at work to look forward to, I did the same before I left yesterday, came back this morning and tested.

IT WORKED! Hooray! Everything’s back to normal now.

Thinking about it, it does make sense. The computer doesn’t really power off completely while it’s still plugged in… and maybe the power supply wasn’t sending the right voltage to the USB ports and had to be reset… of course all that doesn’t matter cause it works now!