Win7 USB Mass Storage Device error

mlah384

Senior member
Dec 17, 2008
228
1
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thisonlinething.com
I just replaced my hard drive in my Dell XPS M1530 Laptop with a Intel 160GB SSD. I installed a fresh copy of Win 7 64bit and now my external USB hard drive will not work. It was working fine in Vista 64bit but when I installed Win7 64bit on this new internal hard drive, the external USB hard drive is not being detected. A USB mouse works fine though. In Device Manager under "Universal Serial Bus controllers" it has a yellow triangle over "USB Mass Storage Device". When I look under properties of "USB Mass Storage Device" it says in "device status": "This device cannot start. (Code 10)"... Anyone know how to fix this? I called Dell tech support (i'm suppose to have phone waranty still on this laptop, but they said it was for hardware, not software and proceeded to throw several sales pitches at me to entice me to buy all this extended warranty stuff) but they were no help. They just told me that they had a fix for it and that it would be $169 for them to tell me how to fix it.. heh

HELP!

Thanks
 

pcgeek11

Lifer
Jun 12, 2005
22,418
5,019
136
" but they said it was for hardware, not software"

This is true but not very precise, they also are required by license to support the OEM software, but only the OEM software that was originally installed on the PC. It appears as you upgraded from Vista to Windows 7.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
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Apparently code 10 is a generic error when Windows doesn't know what really happened so it could be anything from a driver problem to a bad cable.