Z87E-ITX / Intel USB XHCI Issues

|DFA| Havoc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 4, 2014
Messages
201
I seem to be having a run of bad luck with obscure and difficult to diagnose problems lately. This one has been particularly frustrating. Here's the story:

I built a PC with the following specs:

i7 4770k
ASRock Z87E-ITX
Corsair H80
Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1866 RAM
Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD
WD Green 4TB
Silverstone Strider ST50F-ESG 500W Gold PSU
Corsair Graphite 380T Chassis

I installed Win7 Pro 64, then upgraded to Win10 Pro 64. Never had any issues with it, everything worked great. Sold it to a guy locally, and it worked fine for a few days, then randomly decided to stop recognizing all the USB ports (both 2.0 and 3.0). All the USB devices still work fine in BIOS (KB, Mouse, Flash Drive), so I figured it must be something on the software side.

I opened up device manager and I find that the 'USB xHCI Compliant Host Controller' is reporting that 'This device cannot start (Code 10).' Some googling shows that lots of other people have encountered this same issue, but concrete solutions are lacking. The only suggestion that seems to have worked for some people is to uninstall all the USB devices and let Windows reinstall them. I tried that to no avail, though in a single instance (dozens of attempts to repro failed) disabling the xHCI controller and then re-enabling it caused everything to suddenly detect and work again magically - until restart, then back to square one. I've looked around, but cannot find any drivers from either Asrock or Intel to try in lieu of the Win10 default (the most recent is for Win7 only and refuses to install in Win10). Trying to automatically update simply tells me I already have the best driver installed.

I went so far as to do a complete reset of Win10, which did not solve the problem. I then reinstalled Win7, and all the USB ports started working again using the default drivers - then I installed the aforementioned driver from the Asrock website, which caused the same 'device cannot start' error to start happening again. Uninstalling the driver makes everything work once more, though it leaves an unidentified item in device manager that doesn't seem to affect anything. Results are the same with the driver downloaded from Intel, which I'm pretty sure is the exact same driver.

I saved an image of the Win7 install with everything functional (IE, not using the asrock/intel driver) in case I need to go back to it, then went through the Win10 upgrade process once more. No joy, problem came back immediately.

Other notes:
* BIOS is updated to the latest version.
* Enabling the USB Compatibility Patch option in BIOS or disabling Legacy USB support does not solve the problem, but cause the BIOS to stop recognizing all USB devices (even with the UEFI Setup option that is supposed to retain USB support in BIOS), and then I have to do a CMOS clear to get back in.


TLDR: USB ports were working in fine in Win10, suddenly stopped and xHCI controller no longer starts. Can't find any updated or alternate Win10 drivers to use. USB ports are physically fine, everything works in BIOS and Win7 (as long as I don't change any of the Legacy Support or USB Compatibility options in BIOS, or install the updated driver available for Win7, which breaks it in the same way as Win10).

I'm hoping someone with a deeper understanding of all this stuff has heard of / encountered this issue before and can point me in the right direction.
 
Thought I figured out the solution, tried tweaking the power settings for the USB hubs to not go into power saving, then set the system's power plan to high performance. Uninstalled and reinstalled the XHCI controller again, and tada, suddenly everything works!

Until rebooting, that is. Just a fluke, like the other times, and can't reproduce it now. :|
 
Tried swapping out the CPU, RAM, SSD, and PSU, did another clean install of Win10... no change.

I bought the board on the For Sale / Trade forum here, and the seller hasn't replied to my request for the receipt in order to try an RMA (which I don't even know will solve it, since it seems to be a software issue), so at this point I'm stuck unless I can find a fix.

Anybody have any suggestions?
 
maybe the usb controller is just going bad, try running linux distro and see if you have any usb problems, if so, then rma, if not, it's bad drivers
 
The guy I bought it from got back to me, and unfortunately he does not have the receipt, so RMA is almost certainly out of the question now.

I suppose Linux is worth a shot just to confirm my suspicions (remember they work fine in Win7 as long as I don't install the driver)... I don't have tons of linux experience though, any particular distro that you'd recommend for this?
 
any popular distro, doesn't make much difference... you don't even have to install it just use a livecd
 
also if you can't fix the issue or rma, you can get a usb pcie adapter, that will give you 4 or 5 brand new usb ports
 
Unfortunately this board, being ITX, has only one PCI-E slot... That's where the video card goes. :/
 
oh, that sucks, see if you have an xHCI mode in the bios settings, if you do try disabled first
 
Unfortunately, there are no xhci handoff settings in the BIOS, that was one of the first things I looked for. They do have a couple of options relating to USB (compatibility patch, legacy OS support), but changing any of those settings either makes no difference, or causes the USB ports to stop working in BIOS. :|
 
Well, looks like Asrock is going to let me RMA without the receipt. I guess we'll see how that goes.

Thanks for the suggestions, in any case!
 
Just to follow up, the replacement board Asrock sent me appears to be working fine. Still seems totally bizarre to me, don't understand why the USB ports would work fine in BIOS and Windows 7 and not Windows 10 and somehow be a hardware issue...
 
ive been having this same problem with Z87e-itx for 2 days now.

i moved my kids computers hardware to new DAN A4 case, didnt shut the case and started it to check everything works. Everything did work - kids played with it for few mins and then turned off the comp so i could close the case properly...and afterwards all usb drivers are dead. :/ 3y old mobo, so i doubt asrock will let me RMA it, but i did email their support so lets see what they answer.

ive updated every single driver i could, but cant get rid of that problem with "USB xCHI Compliant Host Controller" error in device manager.
 
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