Problem with USB SATAII hard drive

[Hitman *B2Z*]

Hi everyone,

New to these forums, only registered today.

Hoping to get some help to a weird problem I'm having with my external USB hard drive. It's a Seagate 120GB SATII.

I use this to transfer files from my office PC (running XP Pro) to my home PC (running Vista Ultimate 64bit).

This drive is about 2 months old and has given me no problems whatsoever until about a week ago when it started intermittently disappearing from my home PC. I would plug it in, it would recognise the drive, then it would disappear again after a few secs. And it keeps doing this as long as I have it plugged in to my home PC.

However I do not have this problem when the drive is plugged into my work PC.

Very strange behaviour and quite frustrating to say the least. :bang head

I have done Google searches for a solution but found nothing that helped.

I have also done a search on these forums and could not find anything either.

Hopefully someone here may be able to help me and provide a solution.

Thanks in advance guys.


Cheers....

[redduc900]

Do you get a "USB device not recognized" bubble appear from the tray, or does the drive keep disconnecting? Are you connecting the HDD before turning the PC on, or after Windows has loaded? Is the HDD recognized either in Device Manager or Disk Management? What are the system spec's of your home PC, and what sorts of USB options do you have in the BIOS? And have you installed SP1 on your home PC, including all of the latest available updates?

You might also want to check to see if the usbstor.inf file is located in the C:\Windows\Inf folder. If the file isn't present, copy / paste it from the C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository directory.

Edit: I should also note that even if the file is present in the %systemroot%\inf directory it may be corrupted, so it would be best to overwrite the file regardless.

[Hitman *B2Z*]

Do you get a "USB device not recognized" bubble appear from the tray, or does the drive keep disconnecting? Are you connecting the HDD before turning the PC on, or after Windows has loaded? Is the HDD recognized either in Device Manager or Disk Management? What are the system spec's of your home PC, and what sorts of USB options do you have in the BIOS? And have you installed SP1 on your home PC, including all of the latest available updates?

You might also want to check to see if the usbstor.inf file is located in the C:\Windows\Inf folder. If the file isn't present, copy / paste it from the C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository directory.

Hi mate, thanks for your post.

My home PC recognizes the drive but only for 5-10 secs and continually disconnects and tries to connect it again, all the while making the usual beeping noises that you hear when you connect a device to the USB ports.

It doesn't show up in the Disk Management as it doesn't stay connected long enough.

I generally connect this drive after system has booted up and I'm at my Vista desktop.

SP1 and all possible updates are installed.

My system specs at home are:-

CPU: Q6600, MB: P35C-DS3R, GFX: 8800GTS 640MB, 4GB Geil DDR2 800, O/S: Vista Ultimate 64bit

As for BIOS options, not sure at this time, this is something I'll have to look at when I get home and post up here.

I will check for that .inf file as you have suggested and let you know the outcome.

Thanks again for your help, much appreciated.


Cheers....