UNSOLVED
unfriendly usb storage device
hello,
background: i had a dell xps 400 that was working great for quite a while. then one day the BSOD-
the blue screen of death. I tried to conquer it , but it was to great an obstacle, I was defeated--- Off to The dreaded reformat option ,rebooted from the operating disk that came with my system(ctrl+f11 option was not an option--ahhhh don't ask). Well no working audio or video--just a driver problem. A few more problems and---fast forward--
a few reformats later.
problem: I have a 250gb buffalo external hard drive with my backed up files. The problem is i can
not see it. The drive is plugged in via USB 2.0. When i installed I made sure the chipset drivers
were installed first--read somewhere this was important-- before the usb drivers. Before when things were good, i would plug the drive in and it would add a letterd local disk which would be the drive and it would appear in windows explorer. Well now when i plug it in it makes the noise but no drive appears.
I went to device manager and there was a yellow exclamation mark next to usb mass storage device. and it said that there was a problem with the device and it gave the advice to unplug it and plug it in again --I did. Now the exclamation mark is gone.
but,
In my computer i have C,Dand E as local drives, F:-DVD-ROM and G DVD-RW.
here is the weird part H,I,J,K are listed in windows explorer as removable disks. now there is a
icon in my systray that safely removes hardware, when i click once on that icon it lists 2 USB Mass storage devices 1) Drives(H,I,J and K),--2) Usb Mass storage device.
when i click twice it opens the safely remove hardware dialog. with 2 listed --clicking properties--the first are the H,IJ and K and the other is the buffalo 250gb drive. it appears to me that somehow it is linking all the other usb's as one usb mass storage device.
If i could get to see the drive i could restore the rest of my files.
other things i tried is to power down everything and power back up.
tried different usb ports on my computer and on my monitor.
right clicking on those usb mass storage devices in device manager it says that both are working properly.
that's it
thanks,
craig
Uncle Ripper
591 Posts
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Posted April 20th, 2007 01:00
You have to unplug everything. If the two printers have card slots the computer will seee them as removable drives. May even assign a drive letter without the card reader slots. bad news I think, Looks like it's time for another reformat. There is a way you can change the drive letter set up but I'm not sure how, may want to google it.Toadman666
14 Posts
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Posted April 28th, 2007 06:00
Just like Ripper said...
Unplug all USB devices,(except for USB keyboard/mouse) esp. a media card reader (unplug physically from your MOBO). Also, some, newer monitors have media card reader ports, unplug USB cable to monitor before reformatting.
My OS repeatedly named my C:/Home/base drive the K:\ drive after reformatting until I did this.
Alternatively, your could try to change your drive letters directly. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844
Hope this helps...- thanks for all the help!!!i left the 2 printers unplugged and the monitor usb cord unattached. did the reformat with the same outcome.--usb mass storage drive not recognized in my computer.during some of the previous reformats --thedrive was always recognized, however i lost the information on the buffalo drive= no back up possible. I am back up and running now and the drive is recognized,this is how i did iti went into start-->rt click on my computer-->manage--> disk management and the drive was therebut with no letter i tried to assign a letter but it stated that it was not formatted. uh oh, since reformatting will lose all my information on the drive, ()there were some other solutions but they did not seem to apply to me). I reformatted and assigned it a drive letter now when i plug it in a drive letter apears in my computer as it should..a little further discussion: while researching this issue, I found that this is a pervasive problem and many people had solutions, they swore those solution worked for them, but i t was not working for me. i stumbled upon an answer ( did not save the url, sorry)in a microsoft forum, the author listed 10 things you could try if you had this problem. she further stated that the solutions will work for some, and may not work for others.in my case, i think that umplugging and plugging in the harddrive so many times under and me being stressed out.probably erased the drive info, becasue i did not use the safely remove hardware icon in the systray. I sincerely hope that this information can be used by someone so that this scenario is not repeated.thanks again,craig
Uncle Ripper
591 Posts
313
0
Posted April 19th, 2007 23:00