Trying to breathe some extra life into my computer now that we’re past the windows 10 EoL and I’m trying to install Mint

So far everything seems to be working fine except that some of my USB ports don’t seem to be working.

They work in Windows, they work in the BIOS but once I’m up and running in with some of them just stop.

My motherboard is a gigabyte ga-990fxa-u3 (Rev 4.0) running the latest bios version

It has some USB 3.0 ports, and some 2.2, I’m not home right now to double check but I believe it’s the 2.2 ports that aren’t working.

I played around with Linux a little bit well over a decade ago but I’m essentially a total Linux noob

Anyone got any thoughts about what’s going on with these ports or how to fix it?

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    There’s a few different ways for you to probe for info on your USB devices:

    lsusb - lists pretty much everything usb related, including root hubs on your motherboard

    For a more readable lsusb output you can lsusb -v | grep -E '\<(Bus|iProduct|bDeviceClass|bDeviceProtocol)' 2>/dev/null in my experience it can be helpful to slap a sudo on the beginning as well because sometimes certain devices can’t be polled without root privileges.

    usb-devices - similar to lsusb but produces much more detailed information

    find /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb*/ -name dev - produces a list of where the system saves information on usb devices. Each of the listed folders will hold a lot of files with a wealth of information on each usb device, but be very careful and do not edit these files.

    You can also do this to see what the system is doing in the background and then try plugging and unplugging devices from the offending usb ports:

    watch "dmesg | tail -20"

    You’ll at least be able to see if the system is registering anything at all when trying to use those ports, or if it’s as though the system doesn’t see them at all.

    I have a similar issue on my Lenovo ThinkBook but the ports don’t work in any OS despite being enabled in the UEFI. I still haven’t figured out what is wrong with them, but it seems they may just be toast. Thankfully the USB-C ports still work and I can just connect a hub to one of those.