USB drive gets assigned a letter sometimes and sometimes not

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yousuf Khan
  • Start date Start date
Yousuf said:
Yeah, well that's exactly what it's doing. After a few minutes of
retrying, the interface comes up with the yellow bang in device
manager, saying there was a problem. Two yellow bangs come up
actually, one under the USB tree where an error code 10 shows up
against the USB mass storage drive device. And another yellow bang
shows up under SCSI & RAID controllers tree, where some virtual SCSI
controller shows up with error code 37.



I've been monitoring this drive intently for a long time. SMART
doesn't even report anything now, since it's not working. In the past
when it was working, SMART claimed everything was perfect on it.
However, I was suspicious about this drive in the past because I
could see that its temperature was sky-high, reaching into the 50°C
range after long usage.
Click to expand...

What was the brand of the drive before it died ? Most
drives will survive that but the Maxtors usually dont for long.
 
Rod said:
Its usually this problem
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925196
Click to expand...


Well, I tried this utility. After it finished, it rearranged my drive
letters, and created three phantom hard drives assigned them drive
letters J, K, and L.

I've managed to rearrange the real hard drive letters back to normal,
but, now how am I going to delete these phantom hard drives?

Yousuf Khan
 
Why when you werent having that problem and just have a dead external drive ?
Click to expand...

You should be able use a restore point to get back to the original config.

You did do a proper image before you molested the registry didnt you ?
 
Rod said:
OK, you should be able to check its outputs with a multimeter.
Click to expand...


This turned out to be the problem! I took my LaCie hard drive to my
friend's house and used the power supply from his identical LaCie drive,
and it worked right away on his computer! Then I tried my own power
supply again, and the same failure showed up on his computer that I'd
been seeing. So it looks like it's just the power supply that went bad.
Hallelujah! Now I simply gotta find a new power supply.

Yousuf Khan
 
Rod said:
What was the brand of the drive before it died ? Most
drives will survive that but the Maxtors usually dont for long.
Click to expand...


Internally it was a Seagate 500GB. Don't remember the exact model number.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yousuf Khan wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Click to expand...
This turned out to be the problem! I took my LaCie hard drive to my
friend's house and used the power supply from his identical LaCie
drive, and it worked right away on his computer! Then I tried my own
power supply again, and the same failure showed up on his computer
that I'd been seeing. So it looks like it's just the power supply that went bad. Hallelujah! Now I simply gotta find a
new power supply.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the washup, too rare imo.
 
Yousuf Khan wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Click to expand...
Internally it was a Seagate 500GB. Don't remember the exact model number.
Click to expand...

That could be a problem because Seagate bought out Maxtor.

But its academic now that you know its the power supply thats failed.
 
Rod said:
Why when you werent having that problem and just have a dead external drive ?
Click to expand...


I tried this before I figured out real cause of the problem.

Yousuf Khan
 
Rod said:
Yousuf Khan wrote

Thanks for the washup, too rare imo.
Click to expand...


And it looks like LaCie is going to be replacing the power supply for
free under the warranty, even though I don't think it's still under
warranty. Oh well, won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Yousuf Khan
 
And it looks like LaCie is going to be replacing the power supply for
free under the warranty, even though I don't think it's still under warranty.
Click to expand...

Yeah, thats not that uncommon, most dont even ask if its outside warranty.
Oh well, won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Click to expand...

It would be wise not to let it get too hot if its got a maxtor drive in it.
 
Rod said:
Yousuf Khan wrote

You did however know that you couldnt see the SMART data
from the drive anymore, so it wasnt just a drive letter problem.
Click to expand...


Well, I finally fixed this issue. Part of the solution came from the
original article describing how to delete the UpperLimits and
LowerLimits registry keys.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925196

This goes into the following branch of the registry and removes a couple
of keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

However, the original article didn't say what needs to go back into
those keys when you put them back. So I did some comparing with another
system, and found out that all you needed to put back in was:

UpperLimits (REG_MULTI_SZ) = "PartMgr"

And then of course reboot. Nothing needed for the LowerLimits registry
key in this case.

Oh, and the interesting thing was that while the problem was still
ongoing, Disk Management was detecting three phantom partitions which it
considered were unformatted but it still assigned them a drive letter. I
couldn't figure out how to get rid of the three phantom drive letters, I
could hide them with Tweak UI, but that was just sweeping it under the
rug. And if I tried to delete them from within the registry, they'd keep
coming back over and again during the next reboot. Then I figured out
what those three phantom partitions were: they were my Linux partitions.
Without the "UpperLimits" registry key, Windows couldn't figure out
which partitions belonged to it, and which belonged to something else.

Yousuf Khan
 
Rod said:
Yousuf Khan wrote

That could be a problem because Seagate bought out Maxtor.

But its academic now that you know its the power supply thats failed.
Click to expand...

Well, now that it's working, the internal drive model was this:

Hard Disk Model ID,ST3500830AS


So I think it's an original Seagate rather than a Maxtor.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yousuf said:
Well, I finally fixed this issue. Part of the solution came from the
original article describing how to delete the UpperLimits and
LowerLimits registry keys.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925196

This goes into the following branch of the registry and removes a
couple of keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

However, the original article didn't say what needs to go back into
those keys when you put them back. So I did some comparing with
another system, and found out that all you needed to put back in was:

UpperLimits (REG_MULTI_SZ) = "PartMgr"

And then of course reboot. Nothing needed for the LowerLimits registry
key in this case.

Oh, and the interesting thing was that while the problem was still
ongoing, Disk Management was detecting three phantom partitions which
it considered were unformatted but it still assigned them a drive
letter. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the three phantom
drive letters, I could hide them with Tweak UI, but that was just
sweeping it under the rug. And if I tried to delete them from within
the registry, they'd keep coming back over and again during the next
reboot. Then I figured out what those three phantom partitions were:
they were my Linux partitions. Without the "UpperLimits" registry
key, Windows couldn't figure out which partitions belonged to it, and
which belonged to something else.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the washup, too rare IMO.
 
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