I've lost my external USB drive

[Wintermute]

I had a problem recently with WinXP not recognising a USB memory stick. It's a known problem and the suggested fix - going into disk mgmt and manually assigning a drive letter - worked.

I also have a WD MyBook external USB drive. It's permanently plugged in: usually it shows up as E:\ - it's gone. The only thing showing up in disk mgmt is C:\

USB controllers in device mgmt is:

• Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
• Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller
• Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller
• Unknown device
• USB root hub
• USB root hub
• USB root hub

So... all of them are "working normally", except for the (new entry, I think) "unknown device". The only other thing I've got plugged in is the USB base for an MS wireless mouse. The external drive sounds fine, it powers up and down with the pc; it's almost blatantly apparent that I've just manually overwritten something and - I'm guessing - I could go and hunt for the driver cd and reinstall, which would wipe the slate clean, as it were. But do I need to go to all that trouble? If I've manually fucked it, surely I can manually unfuck it? How do I debug something like this? Is there a "find drives" button?

 

[rhod]

Have you tried deleting the "unknown device" entry & rebooting?

 

[Wintermute]

Yeah, tried that this morning. I get the "Found USB drive" popup from my system tray but none after that, and then the unknown device is back in device mgmt.

I'm going to have to dig out the driver disk, aren't I?

 

[Crispy]

external drives shouldn't even need a driver

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Uninstall the USB controller drivers. Reboot and let it redetect them. They've been known to throw tantrums every now and again.

 

[Radar]

Are you trying all this with the USB memory stick in situ ? Have you checked to make sure you didn't allocate e: to the memory stick when you assigned it a drive letter ?

 

[Wintermute]

Crispy - exactly. This is what I can't figure out.

Bob - err... where You mean uninstall everything in that list I posted of USB stuff under device mgrs?

Radar - no. USB stick is out. But yes, that's what I did. What's always happened before is E: gets reallocated to the external drive when the stick is removed - this time, I just lose my E: drive completely.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Just these:

# Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
# Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller
# Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller

 

[Radar]

Hmm. I have a WD Mybook Pro 500G, and when I hooked it up to my old XP setup it just autodetected and worked. However I had been playing with a USB memory stick beforehand, so the USB mass storage drivers would already have been installed. I did do the sw install for the shutdown button.

WD only give support for 30 days from your first call, so if you haven't spoken to them yet you should still be good for phone tech support, othewise it looks like $15 per incident.

 

[Wintermute]

Just these:

# Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
# Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller
# Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller

That did it Unplugged everything, uninstalled everything, plugged it all back in - didn't even restart Windows - and it's all back again as if nothing had happened. Lesson learnt: do not meddle in the affairs of pcs, for they are subtle and quick to stop recognising your external devices.

Thanks all