USB working only once in a while

Support & Help Requests
3

It could be that your system is powering down your USB ports to save energy.
It might do that in a rather rude and inconvenient way because of BIOS bugs.

The quick hack/check:

To check if the USB ports are powersaved, paste this in a terminal:

cat /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control

'on' means "on"
'auto' means "can be powersaved"

To set all USB powered devices permanently on, paste this in a terminal:

for line in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control
do
         echo 'on' | sudo tee "$line"
done

Now see if your USB is working again.
Changes will not be permanent and are back to default after a reboot.

The comprehensible version:

Alternatively, you can use powertop to check if the USB is set to 'suspendable'
and also to get some more information in a relatively easy way:

To install powertop:

sudo apt install powertop

Then run powertop from a terminal:

sudo powertop
  1. Use [tab] to Navigate to the tab 'tunables':
  2. Use cursor [up]+[down] to select a line starting with 'Autosuspend for USB'
  3. if it says 'good' use spacebar to toggle it to 'bad'
  4. do this for every line starting with 'Autosuspend for USB'

( In the upper-lefthand corner you'll see the commandline appear that powertop uses to set the tunables every time you toggle an entry. )

4 Likes