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I have a desktop PC with Windows 11 Pro 23H2 that's been working well for a couple of years. In the last week, however, USB devices except for mouse and keyboard have stopped working. At first, I noticed that my trusty USB microphone didn't want to connect to any USB port – there was a yellow warning triangle in Device Manager and a message that there are no drivers (and none to download –it's plug and play so there aren't even drivers to download from the manufacturers).
Two different brands of USB microphones also failed. Then I noticed I couldn't connect my Sony camera. After a suggestion to uninstall the Intel Host Controller and reboot, my external USB hard drives also stopped working, and now the list of entries with yellow triangles under "Device Manager -> Other devices" is growing long. Sfc and DISM haven't helped. Neither has Windows Update. I don't see any reason to suspect a hardware error.
I tried ChatGTP, which suggested that I look for usbstor.inf, usbvideo.inf, and wdma_usb.inf. They're all present and I haven't been able to update them in any way. I also found a web page that tells me to check for Invalidated registry flags in the DriverDatabase, but I can only find an entry for usbstor.inf, and that one doesn't say "invalidated".
Any suggestions? I'd like to avoid a complete reinstall.
What you could try is an in-place upgrade, for this you need to download the latest Windows ISO from the official Microsoft site, then mount it on Windows 11 and execute it and select to update keeping files, this will reinstall Windows.
https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11?msockid=36f77be9f1be6de331b26dbdf09b6c8e
For some reason I'm unable to mount the iso file – I get a "Sorry, there was a problem mounting the file" error after a pause of several minutes. If I try to mount the drive with PowerShell, I get the error "The semaphore timeout period has expired".
I've verified the hash, and tried a few fixes people recommend online (restarting Windows Explorer, moving the file, checking a few boxes under the file properties, changing the drive letter of my G: hard drive to F:, in case there was a clash), but nothing has helped so far.
Do you have any idea how I can mount the iso file? I could possibly try burning the iso to a BluRay disc and installing it from there, if that would work. Or is there some other method to repair Windows?
what you could try instead of mounting the file is extract it with tools like WinRAR an from the extracted folder use the setup file, that should work.
That worked! Thank you so much. This was a huge relief.
Hi! Sorry to hear that you have troubles with this situation, could you please share more information, did this started after an update or installing some software? could you please try this to check any third party software issue:
I tried disabling the things you mentioned, but it didn't help.
I don't recall installing any software recently, and I can't tell exactly when the problem started, as the hard drives kept working at first and I only noticed the problem once I tried to connect a microphone, but I successfully connected my Sony camera on August 17th, so everything was probably working then.
My Windows Update history reveals that I installed the cumulative update KB5063875 on August 24th, so that could be the problem, although I can't tell for sure. However, that's not one of the updates Windows Update lets me uninstall, and I have no Windows Restore Points.
Any suggestions?
Apparently, resetting the PC (which I'd really prefer not to have to do) might not even be an option anymore:
Microsoft has warned millions of users on Windows 11 23H2/22H2 and Windows 10 against using the built-in Reset and Recovery feature. After the recent August 2025 updates (KB5063875 for Windows 11 23H2 and KB5063709 for Windows 10), the Reset and Recovery features are broken.
