>From what it sounds like this seems to be a case of either the USB 3 chip not being supported, or the xhci driver not quite gluing to it. This often results in the USB 2 and 1 stuff still working, but nothing USB 3 attaching.
Given all of the trials described in other messages, it could be either you removed or commented out the xhci driver, or something that its connected to... or possibly the firmware/bios/apci isn't quite passing things correctly. I've had a little luck adjusting USB related settings in other computer's firmware settings, but a few newer intel systems just don't quite have working usb support, or the pci reports aren't quite updated to include them. I wish you luck with that, about all I could suggest would be to make sure you've not disabled xhci in your kernel config.
