USB drives not recognized anymore.

Laurence wrote on 6/7/2010, 8:21 PM
For the past few days, my laptop won't recognize most external USB2 drives. This is a disaster as I do all my editing off external drives. If I go to the device manager, the drives are there and listed as "working properly". I can go to the disk manager and delete and reinstall partitions, and if I do the drive might work for a while but not for ever. This whole problem started after Windows installed a "critical update" even though I have my automatic updates turned off. Any ideas? I'm way behind schedule and I need to fix this if I'm going to get anything done.

Comments

Rob Franks wrote on 6/7/2010, 8:45 PM
Well I'm not sure how windows updates things when auto update is turned off... never happened to me. But I suppose that's another issue. Do you have a disk image you can fall back on? Are you absolutely sure it's windows? I ask because I have a laptop where the usb port has been used so much now that the connections are lose and I actually have to wiggle the mouse connect around to get it to work. Even with that it works for a while and than cuts out... I then have to re-adjust the plug.

Does the laptop have a card slot? If so then try adding another usb port.
fldave wrote on 6/7/2010, 8:46 PM
I recently lost all USB and Firewire capability on my main editing XP workstation. System was extremely slow.

I ran Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Spybot, and Avast in Safe Boot mode and it found them. Basically a virus had taken over and broken lots of pieces of my system, so I had to do a total reinstall. Do lots of data backups on your system drive.

I'm not saying that is your problem, but this thing took out all of my externals first over a period of a few days.

But my system runs like new now, but it took a few days to get my editing functionality back.
Opampman wrote on 6/7/2010, 9:38 PM
Try right clicking on My Computer and selecting "Manage". Look under "disc management" and see if your drive is listed. You can rename it there because sometimes widows gives it the same name as another drive.
darkframe wrote on 6/8/2010, 5:21 AM
Hi,

you might give USBDeview a go (download link at the bottom of the page). That one helped me out of a similar situation. I used the tool to disconnect USB devices which weren't recognised by Windows anymore. Thereafter I restarted the machine and plugged those devices in again. Fortunately they were then all recognised again.

Cheers

darkframe
craftech wrote on 6/8/2010, 5:37 AM
This problem occurs frequently in VIsta.

You could try a System Restore to a point BEFORE the Windows Update. If it doesn't work check for the following:

1. Driver-specific SYS files have to be in C:\Windows\system32\drivers folder

2. Driver-specific INF files have to be in C:\Windows\inf folder

You can copy the file into the appropriate folder, or install a functioning version of the drive that inserts this file into the appropriate folder.

John
im.away wrote on 6/8/2010, 6:16 AM
Quite by accident I found out that the drive mounted inside my external USB case was a Seagate 1TB device. Further research on the 'net produced some really troubling reports of an extremely high number of failures of these drives - in the order of 40%. One of the affected models is ST31000340AS. Turns out that the problem can be prevented with a firmware patch, but you have to remove the drive from the external case and mount it in a desktop PC to install the firmware.

Like you, my video footage is too valuable to take risks with a dodgy drive so I went out and purchased an eSATA PCI express card that can run up to 10 external eSATA drives mounted in up to two separate external enclosures. I then purchased two "ProBox" external enclosures (each can hold 4 2TB SATA drives). I also purchased a single drive enclosure for the eSATA port that my laptop has (but is not multi-channel).

I purchased 6 Western Digital Caviar Black drives and put all my data on them, including a 100% redundant set of files. I took the three external USB (Seagate) drives out and mounted them in the eSATA enclosures as well and use them only for temporary or unimportant data.

What a difference! eSATA is so much faster than USB and has cut the rendering time of one of my projects by a third! And the Seagate drives were discovered before they gave me a nasty surprise.

Back to your problem: If your USB drives have Seagate drives within them (and there are a couple of suspect models), then the symptoms you are getting match what the symptoms are when the firmware of these drives "bricks" them. Once bricked you have to send them back to Seagate to have the firmware changed and the drive "unbricked".

Cut and paste this link into your browser for a response from Seagate: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16246

Cheers

Russ