Did I ruin my rear USB 3.0 ports somehow?

I thought I’d have to reroute a cable connecting my rear USB 3 ports to my 4.5 year old motherboard (ASUS Z170-A) in order to install a new video card so I stupidly disconnected it from my motherboard. I really shouldn’t have because now my Corsair K95 RGB is not being recognized when connected to those ports, yet it lights up like a Christmas tree anyway, go figure. Per Corsair, if one is plugging into a USB 3 port, only one USB plug needs to be used (the one with a little keyboard icon), if into USB 2 ports, both that one and the one with two arrows on it.

Pulling the cable out of the motherboard was a chore, harder than it should have been, and now I think I’ve damaged it. Plugging it back in was similarly difficult. The weird thing is that somehow I had gotten it to work with just the one plug in one of the USB 3 ports, but after bringing the PC back from sleep, suddenly no keyboard recognition again. Bizarre, eh?

Any ideas? Nothing’s got an exclamation point next to it in the device manager. Guess I could plug other things into the USB 3 ports and see if the system sees them.

Two possible things to check.

First is to to check if none of pins on the motherboard connector are bent. You can straighten them with a screwdriver and some effort if so, but they may snap if they’re totally squashed (RIP).

Secondly, check the connector on the cable. If you were yanking at it you may have snapped one of the wires (solder time), or more commonly pulled the wire and its metal connector insert out entirely from the plastic housing. You can usually just push those back in with a screwdriver. These things, I mean:

Look in the little ‘window’ there and if you’re not seeing metal, you need to push it in.

Thanks for the reply. I don’t have a soldering iron nor am I the least bit handy so I hope I can replace the cable if I broke it.

Here’s what’s weird. Having done absolutely nothing to fix the situation I plugged a USB mouse into one of the ports and it was recognized fine, but we’ll see if when I wake the PC from sleep I can still move my cursor around.

I think because there are usually two USB ports and consequently two sets of wires within the cable, you can damage one of the wires and still have full functionality on one port. If you find that to be the case, may be best to leave it be especially if you only really need the one port.

Weird thing there though is this, which I’ve discovered since re-perusing the motherboard manual (posting something I posted elsewhere):

BTW, now looking at the motherboard manual again, I realize I’m a silly man and that the motherboard connector I’m fretting about (right next to the motherboard power connector) is for the USB 3 ports on the top front of my case (an FD Define R5). So the rear USB 3.0 ports (hardwired into the motherboard) would be agnostic about whatever was going on with that connector anyway. Still doesn’t explain why they’re not seeing the keyboard though. Must be an OS/software thing brought on by the change of the video card. Maybe I need to reinstall the iCue software or something. I did notice in POST that instead of “3 keyboard devices”* mentioned before all this I only saw 2.

*what’s up with that anyway? I have only ever had one keyboard attached to this PC. I guess it’s some “virtual device” or something.

EDIT: and more findings! Only one of those USB 3 ports on the back is bad–tested it with a mouse. The other one seems to work for the keyboard, even coming back from sleep. So who the hell knows, maybe it was always bad and I had both plugs in but had the critical one (the one that sends the signals from the keyboard) in the right port, and the other one wasn’t ever doing anything, and since it’s a pain to access, I never tried plugging a flash drive in it or anything.

Depending on the motherboard, it may be a USB port exclusively used for BIOS quick flash. If so it may not actually ‘work’ as a standard USB port (not sure on that as I tend to avoid using these specific ports).

Related: What Is the Motherboard BIOS Quick Flash Button and How Does It Work?

May also just be a software issue. You can use USBDeview to manually remove peripheral drivers from USB ports which may be causing issues. The drivers will typically just reinstall after plugging the peripheral back in.

Thanks for the further reply and the further info.

I’ve gone through my motherboard manual, and there’s no mention of such a button, nor have I seen such back there. I checked the UEFI BIOS and all of the ports are enabled there, so I’m guessing it may be a driver issue as you say. I’ll look into that software utility you mentioned. BTW somebody on another forum mentioned something called a “polyfuse” that I may have tripped at some point but I wouldn’t know where to begin to reset it.

I’m now remembering another thing though, that may have screwed this up way back even though at the time I thought the only casualty was my Windows installation. Namely the mobo’s sole 3.1 port: I’d somehow managed to get a tang (the perpendicular protruding bit) of the I/O shield into the port proper when I built the machine in 2017. When I later plugged a cable connector into it I arose from under my desk to see the kinder gentler Windows 10 version of a BSOD screen, and Windows was truly borked (had to reinstall).

I found the offending I/O shield interference soon after, fixed it, and have since been too paranoid to even try using that 3.1 port (even though at this point, at worst it’s just dead). But now I wonder if that also may have taken out that other port somehow, and I just never noticed till now.