Massive USB Device fail.

Ok so I was trying to get some of my usb devices to work with Vista 64, some of them worked, some were not as Vista seem to not recognize or find drivers for them.

Anyway I was switching the devices between between 64 and my old Win XP 32 machine.

When suddenly, every single one of them are no longer recognized by my Vista 64 machine, Win XP 32 machine, Laptop Win XP 32 or even my Xbox 360. These devices just pop up as "USB device unknown".

The devices that seem corrupted are:
1) Sony Digital Camera
2) Creative Zen 30 GB HD MP3 player.
3) Lacie USB Harddrive
4) Buffalo USB hard Drive

It's odd because my MP3 player's hard drive still can play music to my headphones. My Digital Camera can still show images and send images to the TV via a jack.

But anytime I try to connect these devices to a USB port, they aren't recognized, they either don't come up at all or come up as "USB device unknown".

My feeling is that somehow, software in the USB devices that connects to the computer has been corrupted in all three, most likely by Vista 64 (what a piece of crap).

Could it be that I unplug them without "Saftely Removing Hardware"? I did it all the time before (on Win XP 32) without incident, now suddenly all of them breaks at once?

Is there a solution? How can I repair the USB device if my computer won't recognize it?

1) This belongs in the fixing PC forums
2) Is these USB ports fixed to the motherboard, or did you stick them via e.g. PCI card? If you did do the latter, try pushing it down further. If it's the motherboard, read the instructions and see if there are any jumpers that needed switching.

I had USB problems thanks to a jumper problem. I'd at least see around your mobo for such problems.

Moved.

If you can try and use the USB devices on a different machine, with a different OS on them.

If I remember correctly the required OS is mentioned on the instruction for each device. Some devices only work work with their current drivers on the OS specified. Check the device manufactures website to see if a new version of the drivers have been released.

look carefully at the plugs. Try one of the devices in a completely different computer however, It is possible (i hazard to throw this out there) that some kind of fault occurred on one of your computers and it damaged the devices.

- Try loading BIOS settings to fail-safe defaults.

- Try the jumper thingy; only if it says something with USB; otherwise don't mess around because you might end up overclocking something to temperatures you don't like.

- Try to connect something like a flash drive or so; if that doesn't work, reinstall.

- If that doesn't help, well, I'd declare your motherboard dying.

- If the flash drive does work; you need to get new casings for the hard drives; maybe a cardreader for the camera and a new mp3 player.

Well, that kind of concludes my approach to this problem.