I am having trouble with my two USB-A expansion cards. When first installed they worked fine, recognized my cooling mat, thumb drives, and ancient game controller. A few days later and, well, they don’t recognize anything being plugged in. My USB-C drives are working fine, and I have a USB-A to C adapter as a workaround, but I don’t want that to be a permanent solution. I’ve checked my Driver Manager and Framework’s downloads page for drivers in case that was the issue, but there weren’t any driver updates available. I have also restarted the computer twice since the USB-A cards stopped working.
I have the USB-A cards plugged in to slots 2 and 5. Should I move them to different slots? My USB-C cards are in slots 1 and 4 and haven’t caused a lick of trouble.
Here’s my OS info:
OS: Linux Mind 22.2 Cinnamon
Cinnamon Version: 6.4.8
Kernel: 6.14.0-33-generic
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS w/ Radeon 780 Graphics x 8
I think you should contact support, but before that, can you see if the USB A cards work in slots 1 and 4 and then if USB C works on slots 2 and 5? We need to make sure it’s a card issue rather than an issue with the mobo.
Definitely swap around the expansion cards and see what works where.
(The USB-A cards are electrically very simple, there are no drivers involved, they just have a resistor to signal to the internal USB-C port that they’re USB-A and should provide 5v by default. The USB-C expansion cards are even simpler, nothing at all but extending the port out to the edge.)
I recently had a weird case on my FW13 where the front right expansion port stopped working. It had the micro-sd expansion, and it stopped working, and I swapped it for a USB-A port, and that also didn’t work at all. I rebooted, still didn’t work. Finally I found some reddit discussion suggesting to go into the BIOS and “disconnect battery” temporarily … and that fixed it. I think the “retimer” for that internal usb-c port needed a proper power-reset (and shutdown doesn’t do that).
Well I checked the potentially bad ports by moving the USB-As to slots 3 and 6. The mouse was able to control the cursor, but the RGB lighting didn’t turn on like it did while plugged into a USB-C port via adapter. I then put the USB-C card that my power cable is connected to into ports 2 and 5. The computer was not shown as charging while plugged into slots 2 or 5, as though it wasn’t even plugged in. When I put the USB-C and charging cable back to slot 1, it started charging again.
Update: I contacted support and worked with them for a few days. The expansion card slots wound up working just fine after I emailed them, so maybe the slots just needed to be scared into working? No idea. I did update my BIOS and restore it to default settings, so that may be a helpful step for anyone else who winds up with this problem. As for my mouse’s lighting, turns out the lights got turned off somehow, but that was an easy fix.
So, basically, no idea why the slots stopped working and even less of an idea why they started behaving, but things are all working fine so far. If anyone else stumbles over a similar issue, contacting Support is the way to go, they’re fantastic.
