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Hi Team, first time posting, so appreciate your help and patience. 

 

Any fixes to get the two USB ports being recognized by my HP laptop again?  I read online that "The Windows operating system has built-in protection to disable USB ports when a power surge occurs. As a result, it disconnects the device attached to the USB port. When this happens, many could mistakenly assume that their USB port has become faulty, but instead, it might have simply been disabled."

 

I have moderate computer knowledge but need an expert, as I've tried a lot!  I own a HP 15s-eq1000 Laptop PC.  I had my Seagate portable external hard drive plugged into one of the two USB ports on my HP laptop.  While transferring files from the laptop to the external hard drive, I heard a beep like the USB connection disconnected, then the screen reset, and now the laptop doesn't read or recognize any external devices being plugged into either of the two of the USB ports.  When you plug a device into the HP laptop USB ports, it's not "lighting up" the external device, like the external device is being charged, and if you go to My PC, it's not bringing up any of the external devices being plugged in.  I've tried, the external hard drive, USB stick, a mouse, etc.  The Seagate external hard drive is not the issue, as it works fine when it is plugged into my Xbox

 

I've tried most of the suggested solutions found online like changing the power settings in various places, uninstalling the USB drivers on the device manager, and restarting to reinstall, updating the bios... nothing has worked thus far.  I believe that my external hard drive may have caused windows 10 to shut down both USB ports (hopefully as a safety feature), by either overheating, or thinking that they are drawing too much power from the HP laptop.  Any fixes to get the two USB ports being recognized again? 

 

Laptop is only 18 months old, really don't feel like paying $200+ to bring it into a shop, may as well buy a new laptop at that point.  Hoping the USBs didn't get fried from the external hard drive being plugged in, with normal use.  And because both USB ports died at the same time, not just 1 of the 2 ports, hoping it's a laptop/software issue that can be resolved.  Not a hardware issue.  I would think a hardware issue would kill only one USB port, not both

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