After almost a year working perfectly all of a sudden I noticed how the audio devices associated with my external Asus Xonar U7 soundcard are missing (both playback and recording devices) and when I tried unplugging the USB cable and reconnect it I get a Windows popup message saying 'USB device not recognized' and in short that I should replace the USB device causing this error message if it persists even after restarting the PC.

 

Obviously I've already tried restarting the PC to no avail and I also tried uninstalling the Asus Xonar U7 software thinking a reinstall might do the trick making sure the driver is in place etc but when I was about to reinstall the software I received a message telling me to first connect the device (which already was connected...). At this time I started to believe my external sound card all of a sudden got broken but just to make sure I also tried connecting it to another USB port and I also tried using a different cable. Still same thing and at this time I was close to 100% certain the sound card was at fault but just to be 100% sure I also tried connecting the sound card to my job PC and what do you know...there the sound card was discovered and recognized by Windows on the first attempt ?!

 

So...for whatever reason my main flight sim rig all of a sudden stopped recognizing my Asus Xonar U7 sound card which I use for ATC communication and I have no clue how to fix this. Looking in Device Manager the sound card is listed under the Universal Serial Bus controllers as an 'Unknown Device' with a yellow exclamation mark and when trying to update it's drivers I'm told the best driver for this device is already in use...yeah right...that's great but not of much help when the sound card is not working anymore...

 

I also tried running some MS tool called USB Troubleshooter or something like that but still that didn't fix the problem. I also made sure looking at all my USB hubs under the Device Manager the Power Management setting 'Allow Windows to turn this device off' is disabled for all USB hubs.

 

What else...I tried uninstalling the unknown device and then scanned for hardware changes but to no avail. I also tried switching my PC off and the also removed the power completely for about 1 minute after a tip I found online but still no go. Finally I tried reinstalling my chipset drivers since these normally also contain USB drivers but...yeah...you guessed it...still same problem.

 

Getting a bit annoyed here by this issue so if anyone has any tip how to solve this kind of problem I would be more than grateful !!

Possibly a USB hardware failure? One of my USB ports has failed.

What USB hardware do you mean?

One of my USB ports  gives that error.

I'm happy to tell you I finally managed to fix the problem!

 

What I ended up doing and what showed to be the solution was to focus on the USB hub where my sound card is connected rather than focusing on the sound card device itself in Device Manager.

 

Since I tried everthing I could possibly think of with the sound card (or 'Unknown Device' as it was called looking in Device Manager) I thought to myself maybe there's something wrong with the USB hub causing the sound card to not work correctly. So I simply uninstalled the complete USB hub which in my case was called 'USB 2.0 MTT Hub' in Device Manager and then restarted my computer.

 

After restarting my computer I waited at the Windows logon screen for a couple of minutes allowing Windows to do it's thing reinstalling first the USB hub that I previously deleted as well as all USB devices connected to this hub and what do you know...when I finally logged on to Windows my sound card showed up just fine and I was able to reinstall it's software without any issues.

 

Don't you just love computers sometimes?! Although I would have preferred to do some nice flying today rather than troubleshooting USB issues I'm very happy I finally found a way to fix it and hopefully this might help someone else with a similar problem one day!

 

Edited to add one more thing...when I had the issue and looking at the properties for my sound card listed as 'Unknown Device' in Device Manager the error code was very confusing. It said...

 

"Code 29: This device is disabled because the firmware of the device did not give it the required resources"

 

...and searching on this error message told me this means that the device you're having problem with has been disabled in your computer BIOS and this is the reason it's can't be correctly installed. An example would be if you disable your internal sound card in BIOS which is found on many motherboards. However in my case this error message made no sense since my problem was with an external sound card connected via USB.

 

So...don't let this error message fool you if you run into the same issue one day.

One of my USB ports  gives that error.

 

Sorry to hear that but in my case I tried several different USB ports to no avail and I knew these ports worked perfectly fine when connecting other devices so that's why I was pretty sure I didn't have a faulty USB port.

I'm happy to tell you I finally managed to fix the problem!

Though a little late to this party, I'll share that around the time you had your USB sound card problem, some windows update whacked my USB saitek X52 Pro joystick.  I verified this by using system restore to undo the updates.  Long story short, I finally got my stick back after allowing those updates, though not without some serious gnashing of teeth.