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WTF!! 5 of my external drives are now showing as offline and unallocated

A

Arkitech

Diamond Member
For some reason my 5 external drives (which are connected via USB) are all showing as offline and unallocated. I'm positive it is'nt hard drive failure (what are the odds that 5 drives would all fail at the exact same time). I think it's something to do with Vista's way of handling USB connections and the annoying "Found New Hardware" wizard. Anyone encounter an issue like this? What's the best way to resolve it?
 
I wonder if this is in any way related to a problem someone mentioned in the Storage forum, that when they insert a 16GB USB flash drive, Windows Vista always wants to format it and doesn't recognize the existing format.
 
A long shot, but check the power management settings for the USB Root Hubs (in device manager) to make sure that they are not being shut down or turned off.
 
In case anyone else is following this thread or having similar problems I'll post an update. After digging around on google for a bit I found a few articles which points to SP1 as well as another possible MS update which when installed seems to cause various usb issues. I'm in the process of rolling back the SP1 update and I'll report back later.

Just for the record after installing Vista SP1 I started seeing various usb related issues. Devices would stop working (mouse, keyboard, hard drives) and other usb devices would not detect properly (mp3 players, digital cams, etc..). Also after every reboot I would get messages that Vista "Found New Hardware", however no matter how many times I tried to install the drivers they would either not work or Vista would find new hardware again after the reboot.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the usb root hub under device manager, I've attempted to also update the drivers for the usb root hub with no success. So now I'm going to try and rollback SP1 and possibly a few other MS updates.




More details to come soon...
 
Uninstalling SP1 fixed the problem. I no longer have the "Found New Hardware" messages, all of my devices are detected and working again (including the harddrives).


It's wierd that Microsoft has known this problem exists dating back to April of this year, but as of September I have not seen anything from MS to correct this problem. Oh well, hopefully if someone out there had the same problems I did they can find this thread and see if uninstalling SP1 will help.
 
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