Vista & External Hard Drive - Not Recognized

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve-Sanders
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Steve-Sanders

I have a new Dell Latitude P520 laptop with Vista Business addition. I have
a Simple Tech 250 gig external (USB) hard drive that I moved over from my
previous XP laptop. My Simple Tech external hard drive worked just fine with
XP, but with my new Vista laptop the external hard drive is recognized very
infrequently and usually only after a restart. Even then the data is only
visable or recognized for a short period of time and then the computer can no
longer access the data (a message says "your file has been moved or is no
longer in this location")

Is there a reliable solution to making Vista and USB external hard drives
work together.

Note, I'm not a "high tech" kind of guy so if you can help - - - I might need
some rather detailed instructions.

Thanks,
Steve
 
Previously Steve-Sanders said:
I have a new Dell Latitude P520 laptop with Vista Business addition. I have
a Simple Tech 250 gig external (USB) hard drive that I moved over from my
previous XP laptop. My Simple Tech external hard drive worked just fine with
XP, but with my new Vista laptop the external hard drive is recognized very
infrequently and usually only after a restart. Even then the data is only
visable or recognized for a short period of time and then the computer can no
longer access the data (a message says "your file has been moved or is no
longer in this location")
Click to expand...
Is there a reliable solution to making Vista and USB external hard drives
work together.
Click to expand...
Note, I'm not a "high tech" kind of guy so if you can help - - - I might need
some rather detailed instructions.
Click to expand...

Hmm. Looks like a driver problem in Vista to me. Not really a
surprise, MS software is known to mature on the cutomers side. The
usual advice is to not use anything new (or anything at all) from MS
and your problem can prossibly only be solved by going back to XP,
waiting for the first service-pack for Vista.

Arno
 
Look for errors in eventvwr and ignore the Linux troll.
In XP WIN-R then type eventvwr. Dunno how Vista does this.
 
In XP WIN-R then type eventvwr. Dunno how Vista does this.
Click to expand...

You get into event viewer the same way with Vista, but the viewer
itself is quite a bit different from the XP one.
 
This looks very much USB2 physical layer issues, not OS issues. Some systems
and devices have very unreliable USB 2 communication because of board
layout, particular chipset signl tolerance, etc. This causes a device to
disappear randomly because of physical layer errors.
 
Previously Alexander Grigoriev said:
This looks very much USB2 physical layer issues, not OS issues. Some systems
and devices have very unreliable USB 2 communication because of board
layout, particular chipset signl tolerance, etc. This causes a device to
disappear randomly because of physical layer errors.
Click to expand...

Ordinarily I would agree, but why did it work with XP then?
Much more conservative driver settings?

Arno
 
Vista system was a different (new) laptop, while XP was previous one, as
seen from the original posting.
 
Previously Alexander Grigoriev said:
Vista system was a different (new) laptop, while XP was previous one, as
seen from the original posting.
Click to expand...

You are right of course. Then I agree that this is likely a
hardware dsesign issue.

Arno
 
Arno,

Thanks, You're probably right. Oddly once I fired up the new Dell and did a
Windows "update" I could view and reliabley use the external hard drive . . .
then after a month it got worse and worse, until the laptop wouldn't see it
at all.

Most of the files I have on the hard drive are songs (from my own CD
collection - not pirated) so I wonder if that's part of the problem, because
Windows Media Player draged and delayed when I tried to play them. Of course
now they don't play at all.

I think I'll take my external hard drive to work (and my PC there with XP)
and see if it's visible again, and hopefully make sure my files ar safe.

Thanks for your comments.

Steve

Arno said:
I have a new Dell Latitude P520 laptop with Vista Business addition. I have
a Simple Tech 250 gig external (USB) hard drive that I moved over from my
Click to expand...
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
longer access the data (a message says "your file has been moved or is no
longer in this location")
Click to expand...
Is there a reliable solution to making Vista and USB external hard drives
work together.
Click to expand...
Note, I'm not a "high tech" kind of guy so if you can help - - - I might need
some rather detailed instructions.
Click to expand...

Hmm. Looks like a driver problem in Vista to me. Not really a
surprise, MS software is known to mature on the cutomers side. The
usual advice is to not use anything new (or anything at all) from MS
and your problem can prossibly only be solved by going back to XP,
waiting for the first service-pack for Vista.

Arno
Click to expand...
 
Frazer,

I found my way to the event view, but the only errors were "Event System"
erros. There was a bunch of them but I can't say the dates and times on the
errors occured when I was trying to access the external hard drive.

Following is the jist of the text I found on one of the errors . . . if this
makes any sense.

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-EventSystem" Guid="{899daace-4868-4295-
afcd-9eb8fb497561}" EventSourceName="EventSystem" />
<EventID Qualifiers="49152">4622</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>17</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2007-06-15T04:11:09.000Z" />
<EventRecordID>7712</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
<Channel>Application</Channel>
<Computer>Stevelap</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
- <EventData>
<Data Name="param1">80070005</Data>
<Data Name="param2">{AA44355E-6911-4447-BA5D-6720480579AF}-{00000000-0000-
0000-0000-000000000000}-{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

Does this mean anything to you or anybody?

Thanks for your help and let me know if you see something here.

Regards
 
Alexander,

Do you mean that maybe the only fix for this is by waiting for (a future)
Windows update . . . this problem may be resolved by MS? Or by purchasing
another external hard drive that is VISTA compatable?

Alexander said:
This looks very much USB2 physical layer issues, not OS issues. Some systems
and devices have very unreliable USB 2 communication because of board
layout, particular chipset signl tolerance, etc. This causes a device to
disappear randomly because of physical layer errors.
I have a new Dell Latitude P520 laptop with Vista Business addition. I
have
Click to expand...
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
Thanks,
Steve
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Steve-Sanders via HWKB.com said:
Alexander,

Do you mean that maybe the only fix for this is by waiting for (a future)
Windows update . . . this problem may be resolved by MS? Or by purchasing
another external hard drive that is VISTA compatable?
Click to expand...


If Alex is correct, then it's not a question of "VISTA" compatibility,
you would almost certainly have the same problem if you had XP loaded on
the problem machine. Have you tried other USB attached drives with the
system, do they work?
 
You are right of course.
Click to expand...

"Of course" he is, topposters are always right.
Especially the ones without a clue how to setup their newsclient properly.
Then I agree that this is likely a hardware dsesign issue.
Click to expand...

Of course you do, babblebot.
Until someone comes up with yet another possibility.
 
On my machine (ASUS mainboard) USB2 peripherals tend to go through perpetual
port cycle, if plugged to certain ports. In one port, they just detect as
USB 1.1, which I use now.
 
Nik,

I have a PNY U3 "launchpad" and while the application won't run on Vista (it
gives me a note that launchpad is not supported by Vista) at least I can save
files to and from the U3 flash drive (1 gig) USB storage device.

I'm also able to print to a USB printer. So to that extent my Vista PC
tolerates other USB devices, just not the external hard drive.

What do you think?

Regards,
Steve
 
I had my external hard drive pluged into a "IOGEAR" 2.0 USBhub unit, but I
moved directly to one of the USB drives on the computer thinking that this
would help. It didn't, hooked to the hub or hooked to the USB port in the
computer I still get the same result . . . can't see the external drive.

How frustrating.

Regards / Steve

Alexander said:
On my machine (ASUS mainboard) USB2 peripherals tend to go through perpetual
port cycle, if plugged to certain ports. In one port, they just detect as
USB 1.1, which I use now.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
problem machine. Have you tried other USB attached drives with the system,
do they work?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Nik / Alexander,

Thanks for your comments and help. FYI I took my external hard drive to work
and hooked it up to my computer that runs XP and bingo. . . the computer saw
and could access all my files.

This appears to be a VISTA issue or the fact that SimpleTech needs to update
their driver to Vista. Either way - the files are there, I just need to hook
the unit up to a comuter running XP.

Thanks for your help.
Steve
 
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