Thinkpads Forum

My USB ports don't work with any kind of drives (flash drives, external hard drives), but a peripheral like a mouse works. I tried to search these forums for an answer, but it's difficult to find the right search terms since searches returns everything that includes "usb ports" in the posts.

I had Ubuntu installed before and it didn't recognize my flash drive (didn't show up as a mountable drive, and flash drive's LED did not turn on at all). At first, I thought something just screwed up in Linux, so months later (now) I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Pro, and the LED light on the flash drive is still off when I plug it in! I've tried every USB port, including all the ones on the X6 dock.

I've tried an external hard drive as well, and that is also not recognized in either OS. A USB mouse works perfectly on any port, however, so the ports aren't actually dead..

I'm hoping this is not a hardware failure, but it shouldn't be because a mouse works. How can I check this? Is there something I can try with the Win7 drivers?

Ok, new update:

Now I'm getting this error message as soon as I plug in the flash drive:

"Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error
The system has halted. "

I'm guessing the fresh Win7 installation hasn't gotten the appropriate fixes and updates yet. I'll try that and see...

This does not sound like a software issue unfortunately. No updates/fixes are needed to recognize flash drives out of the box since about Windows 2000, and I don't know how many Linux generations ago.

The mouse works, since it uses the simpler slower USB1 controller, whereas the flash drive probably tries to communicate with the USB2 one.

I would check the following:

* In the Device Manager, under USB Devices - do you see anything that says USB2/Enhanced controller? Any yellow bangs on it / other controllers? Anything marked as an "unknown device"?

dr_st wrote:* In the Device Manager, under USB Devices - do you see anything that says USB2/Enhanced controller? Any yellow bangs on it / other controllers? Anything marked as an "unknown device"?

In fact, yes, I do see something with a yellow ! icon as "Unknown Device" under the Universal Serial Bus controllers section of Device Managers. Under the properties of that device, the status has: "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)". Looks like you are correct that it's not a software failure.

I just reinstalled Windows 7 again after the weird error message I was getting when plugging in a drive. I'm going to try to install all the updates first before plugging in a drive, but from the Device Manager message, it doesn't look good.

Did you check out drivers from lenovo site for x60 win7? All things/bios up to win7 date?
I installed windows 7 on mine and everything worked pretty smoothly, most drivers were included or downloaded. I remember downloading some stuff from lenovo, but tha tmight have been the thinkpad battery monitor or something, i did it a while back so i'm hazy on it, but everything did work very quickly.

Yup, I've had Win7 on this X60 before, and it ran perfectly even without having to install all the drivers specifically provided by Lenovo. Win7 should support basic USB2.0, and so should Ubuntu, but the fact that none of my USB2.0 devices work on either OS suggests my system board needs to be replaced.

And I'm out of warranty. Not sure what I should do with this X60 now...

If your only issue so far is lack of USB2 support - get a PCMCIA-to-USB2.0 card.