no miner was broken, no cable was broken and no other hardware was broken...
i was not logged in as administrator - after i activated the su, all my 8 miners started without problems
how could i have missed that...
SETTING UP USB DEVICES on WINDOWS/LINUX/OSX
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/blob/master/README#L609
The Gekko setup support page says it also:
https://kano.is/gekko.php#run
I don't have one of those USB sticks to connect to. Preferably something that will work with the builtin GPU on the Windows that I can mine testnet btc or that I use the pool to connect to maybe nicehash or something.