Hey guys I got it working,
The front USB ports were working with my 1tb portable hard drive and phone just not my 8gb usb sticks.
Here's what I did:
Went into 'device manager' and into 'universal serial bus controllers' tab,
With this open I plugged in the usb,
'USB mass storage device' popped up, right click and uninstalled it,
unplugged the usb and replugged it and now it works :)
Still don't know why it had stopped working, but now its back :)