External Hard Drive keeps on showing Autoplay prompt

I have a fresh install of Win7 x64 Ultimate on my PC and there are times that when I reboot my computer or turn it on from an off state I get the Autoplay prompt for my External HDD. This occurrence is totally random and it doesn't happen sometimes. It just gets annoying that when you boot up you see that prompt and you have to close it every now and then. What could be the problem in this case? I have an Asus P8Z68-V motherboard.

Please help. Thanks.

You can check if the plugs are connected ok. Otherwise this is normal in my opinion.
Though you can disable it, open Control panel > Autoplay, now set mixed content or any other fields to 'take no action'.
The message might pop up for a moment afterwards as well, but most times it doesn't as i can remember.

But i do use Autoplay. I want the Autoplay feature to come up when I plug in USB devices in my PC. I'm just annoyed with this one because it is already connected and why should it still me prompt up that. I would say it is "normal" if it happens every single time I reboot or shutdown and turn back on. But this isn't the case, it is happening randomly. I still want to know what's causing these?

One thing to note though, USB3.0 legacy support, USB legacy support, and EHCI Hand-off are all disabled in my BIOS settings because based on what I'm reading in the Internet, Win7 natively supports all of these. Does that ring a bell in my problem above?

Brink said:

Kevin,

From what SG posted above, do you have the external HDD listed under "devices" in AutoPlay (Control Panel) where you could set it to "take no action"?

There is no Device listed under "devices" in Autoplay (Control Panel) even though my external HDD is connected and running properly. Is that also normal?

What does it mean if the device is not listed under Autoplay? Why is my drive still randomly Autoplaying "just after restart"?

There's no Autoplay config file or whatsoever in every directory present in my external HDD. One thing to note though, I partitioned this drive to be GPT, does that count for something in this situation?