USB, Sound, and LAN all died -- UPDATED with new info

[effowe]

I was encoding an HD vid today when my computer froze (screen was frozen, no blue screen.) After a reboot my USB, Sound, and Lan were all not working. I had to go get a ps/2 KB and Mouse just to get into the system. Once in, I went to Device Manager and saw that all of these devices relating to the 3 things that died had the yellow sign with an exclamation mark next to them indicating that they were broken. I downloaded the appropriate drivers from ASUS's site and burnt them onto a cd hoping that I could restore the drivers (all done on another computer.) This also did not work. I tried updating the drivers, uninstalling and reinstalling them, nothing was working. I will be doing some testing over the next couple of days, but are there any suggestions as the best course of action that I can take right now?

Side Note: I tried plugging my PSP into my computer today, and it was not working (it's position in the Device Manager also had the yellow exclamation mark, but everything else was still working at this point.) I unplugged it and plugged it into different slots trying to get it to work. After it didn't work, I started the HD Vid encode, and that's when everything broke. Could I have shorted something while plugging/unplugging this device? I've encoded movies before with no ill effects, so I don't know if that's somehow related. A system restore (point was made yesterday) also did not work on the system.

Mobo - Asus P5Q
Proc - Intel Core2Duo Q6600
Ram - 4gb (2x2gb) Crucial something..
PSU - OCZ GSX700
Video - NVidia 8800 GTS/X (forget exactly)
OS - Vista Home 64bit

I can get the exact hardware stats if needed, this is just in general. This system has been running rock solid and stable for about 1.5 years.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Try reseting the CMOS. just unplug your PC and pull the motherboard battery out for a bit. If that doesn't help then it may be a power issue or a blown part of the motherboard. What video card and PSU do you have?

 

[effowe]

Try reseting the CMOS. just unplug your PC and pull the motherboard battery out for a bit. If that doesn't help then it may be a power issue or a blown part of the motherboard. What video card and PSU do you have?

Updated the OP to reflect that information. I will try the CMOS reset tomorrow when I am able to work on the computer. I was able to boot into Vista and everything else still worked outside of those three things.

 

[effowe]

Some more info. I took mpilchfamily's suggestion and unplugged the computer / took out the cmos battery and left them off for a good 15 mins plus. I then went back into the BIOS and put the settings back to where they should be. When I booted into Vista I had the same problem of the missing USB / Sound / LAN. This is when I decided a clean install may be the way..

I unhooked all the hard drives and plugged in a spare I had laying around and attempted a clean install of Vista. It got through the whole install process at the beginning and rebooted. When it got to where it should start booting, I got a "BOOTMGR is missing" error. I rebooted the Vista DVD and attempted a repair, which didn't work. I also tried re-installing it and that didn't work. I then tried installing XP on the disc, and at first reboot I got an "NTLDR is missing" error, and it splashed some colored blocks over the screen, something I have never seen.

Here's where I'm at, where to go from here?

 

[AlgaeEater]

Whoa something is definitely wrong. I think your motherboard may be on its way out; that or your video card if those colored blocks are showing up during the bios screen.

For what it's worth, I once plugged too many high powered draw devices into my on-board usb ports (all chargers for cell phones, etc) and the computer rebooted on me. Once rebooted, the entire on-board USB ports / PS2 were all dead. My lan still worked somehow, but maybe it was connected to a different capacitor or chip. Sounds like you may be experiencing the same issues.

 

[effowe]

So I was able to do some testing with some old parts I had laying around. I took the old PSU and Video card and hooked them into these components.

MB - ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
Proc - AMD X2 4400
Ram - 1 x 512mb OCZ

I was able to install Vista and the computer seemed to be running fine. After a few reboots, however, I've been getting BSOD's. The first was after I typed my password to get into Vista, it gave an error that I believe started with "dx" something .sys.. cant remember. But since then it has blue screened with "Page fault in nonpaged area" and "IRQL equal or less than" errors. The devices plugged into the USB ports also stopped working (keyboard / mouse) but when I went into Device Manager it still listed them properly (logitech mx whatever..) but the driver failed to load for some reason. After all this, I am thinking that this may be a PSU issue or a Video Card issue, but I don't think that would cause all the weirdness with the USB, I could be wrong.

Any Ideas?

 

[Modelworks]

Motherboard. This usually happens when traces have broken on the board or the south bridge chip that has the USB controllers is bad.

 

[effowe]

Motherboard. This usually happens when traces have broken on the board or the south bridge chip that has the USB controllers is bad.

Then what's causing the problems with the other MB (A8N-SLI)? I was thinking maybe a bad PSU caused the first board to go down, and is causing problems on the old one that I swapped to.