PC having a disagreement with my arduino nanos. [fixed - bad cable]

[Refrigerator]

I made myself a laser engraver with an arduino nano working as the brains of the operation.
Everything was fine until i shut the thing down.
Now when i plug the nano my PC gives me a "USB device not recognized" message.
Grabbed another nano to test the cable and USB ports and everything was fine.
Plugged the supposedly bricked nano back in and it worked, the software recognized it and i thought great.
Plugged the nano back in the breadboard and it's bricked again.
So i pull it out of the breadboard and test it standalone, yes, still bricked.
I plug the spare (good) nano in and now it's not recognized too 
Tried all the USB ports and it does the same.
So now both of my arduino nanos don't work, great.
I plugged my wireless mouse into all of my USB ports and they all work.
Plugged both arduinos into my brother's laptop - same error.
Went to device manager to see what it has to say and found an error message "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)

A request for the USB device descriptor failed."
When i first plugged the good nano in the D13 LED flashed multiple times, now it only flashes once.
I've been using these arduinos on this PC with the same cable for more than a year and everything's been fine.
Does anyone know what's up with this?
Is my laptop into killing arduinos now?

[hamster_nz]

How is the nano being powered when you connect it to the PC? Are they using a common ground?

[Yansi]

Funny how you are suspicious about your laptop killing those nanos. You should very likely suspect about yourself for their death.

Unfortunately, without an exact schematic, we can't tell what may have been wrong in the circuit. Could you please provide one?

[Refrigerator]

How is the nano being powered when you connect it to the PC? Are they using a common ground?

I hold the arduino in my hand and plug the mini-B in, the D13 LED flashes once and that's it, pressing RESET makes the LED flash once more.
On the breadboard the arduino was running on USB power and everything else was connected to 12V.
Arduino was only connected to drivers on the 12V side through a common ground and digital pins (step, dir).

[Psi]

Check all grounds are connected correctly, (common ground)
Check your 12V cannot get onto any arduino's input/output/vcc which are 5.5v max
External crystal faster than 8mhz can be glitchy if you don't wire them up right, short connection and correct caps.

[Refrigerator]

Check all grounds are connected correctly, (common ground)
Check your 12V cannot get onto any arduino's input/output/vcc which are 5.5v max
External crystal faster than 8mhz can be glitchy if you don't wire them up right, short connection and correct caps.

If i remember right they're both 5V 16 MHz but i have not even once had a problem with any of them until today.
Also the "bricked" nano started working and i even unplugged and plugged it back in just to make sure it wasn't just a fluke and it was good until i tried it in the breadboard and it went bad again.
It can't be the breadboard because the nano is only connected through ground, D13, D2, D3, D5 and D6.
If the first nano is bad how come the other nano is behaving the same even without even being connected to any of the driver circuitry.
And if my USB's are bad then how come my brother's laptop behaves the same.
It's 4 AM and i can't get sleep because this is bugging me so much 
Anyways, time for a few tests:
Both arduino nano's on USB read 4,75V at +5V pin, D13 LED flashes once, pressing RESET makes it flash once.
With 12V at VIN, no USB, +5V reads 4,98V, D13 LED flashes once, pressing RESET makes it flash once, both nanos behave the same.
Plugged in 12V at VIN, then plugged the USB in, the arduino didn't show any response other than the single D13 blink during power on, windows says "device not recognized".

[Doctorandus_P]

Could be a bad cable.

Also:
When PC's are not grounded properly then the Pi filter in the powersupply puts half the mains voltage on the case, and your arduinos may not like that.
I've also had some tingly fingers from that a few times and I don't like that neither, so I put a proper grond wires in the wall. That was 15+ years ago and never had tingly fingers since then in my little electronics corner.

[Refrigerator]

Could be a bad cable.

Also:
When PC's are not grounded properly then the Pi filter in the powersupply puts half the mains voltage on the case, and your arduinos may not like that.
I've also had some tingly fingers from that a few times and I don't like that neither, so I put a proper grond wires in the wall. That was 15+ years ago and never had tingly fingers since then in my little electronics corner.

I went to town and bought the most expensive mini-b cable that i could find and the arduinos work now, so it was the cable 
Had that failed i had my UABASP ready to burn the bootloader.

[Psi]

I had no end of issues with USBasp type programmers a few years back.

I'm not sure if you're using the same kind as i had issues with.
From memory it was a AVR mcu doing USB in software and was glitchy as F$%@ because of that.

Moved to a different programmer and all the problems went away.

[Doctorandus_P]

Expensive cables are no guarantee for quality.
Quality cables do not have to be expensive.
Unfortunately there are lots of landfill wannabees in long thin flexible format.

USBasp is a programmer I use quite often.
It does indeed work with a software USB stack.
A simple search will lead you to the source: Thomas Fischl Usbasp, obdev, germany.
I've had general good experiences with USBasp, but there are many variants of the chinese clones with (slightly) different hardware.

One of my biggest failures was with uSD cards.
Bought some from Ali and they tended to die soon, but also other cards seemed to die every now and then.
Finally it turned out that one of my card readers was bad and damged the cards. When I threw that crap away all the other (including the Chinese) cards kept working (Except for one very orld card that was probably simply worn out.)