Strange USB Drive Showing in Device Manager

Gandalf; said:

Boozad - suggest you first try deleting the questionable items and rebooting.
Maybe Microsoft will fix them on reboot.

If not, please remove any Flash Drive and reboot.
Post another Device Manager image without the Flash Drive connected.

Thanks

Hi Gandalf, I've tried deleting the strangely named drive but Windows just reinstalls it upon rebooting. I'm not even sure when the Windows Portable Device appeared and I haven't tried uninstalling that yet. As mentioned previously in the thread I'm pretty sure this all initiated when I tried to apply USB3.0 Boost to one of my Kingston Data Travellers, and any time I plug a USB stick into my front ports now they are assigned the L: path.

Just as a note there were no flash drives attached to the rig when that screenshot in Layback's thread was taken, only my Hitachi Touro Mobile external HDD which is accounted for as drive H:.

Please post a fresh image of your Device Manager, so we don't have to jump back and forth between threads.
Suggest removing all USB devices before posting the Device Manager.

Thanks

occasionally the hub thats part of my keyboard (usb pass through thingy) shows up as a drive that cannot be accessed by me so basically a ghost drive.

it normally disappears if I flick the keyboard profile switch back and forth lol

Badger - I have a VAKOSS USB 2.0.7-PortHUB and when connected my Device Manager doesn't show any devices like are the issues here.

Recommend doing a Microsoft Update while the HUB is connected. You might need a driver or two.

yeah I understand :) I was just saying its a quirky thing that happens to me with my specific keyboard.
I have hubs that dont do this, just my keyboard.

maybe my keyboards inbuilt usb hub has a very small amount of readable and writeable memory as part of the multi bios setup my keyboard has.. that small amount of memory for all intense purposes could be seen by Windows in some rare instances say just after unblugging a device as a storage device.

Understood badger. If it is just the one off HUB, recommend replacing the HUB. If it is just the one off keyboard, the turn the keyboard into a boat anchor.

Right, here's a fresh screenshot of Device Manager and my drives with my Hitachi external drive removed, the only USB components left connected are my mouse and keyboard. As you can see in Device Manager the weird drive is still there, although the Windows Portable Device has disappeared as I uninstalled it. I'll check on a reboot whether that reinstalls itself and report back shortly.
Also the drive is still showing in Disk Management as Drive 3, I've included the screenshot of that with the Properties tab for it open on the left.

It's worth noting that none of this is affecting my system performance and is more an annoyance not being able to find out what they are than a problem of any kind.

Thanks for the data. It really helps.
An item in interest is the Computer Management top item. It has no name.
Can you enter a name and see if it effects the USB Device.
It shouldn't, but it looks different without one. :)

Since you have removed all USB devices, I'm a little confused.
One thing I am thinking, what about a printer? They some time have a Disk capability to them.
Do you have a printer connect? If so what is its Make/Model?

ComputerGeek said:

Tool Tip: Use DevManager to view devices by connection (see how they connect to one another)
Open DevMgr. Click View->Devices by connection. Expand the ACPI device. Now, expand the 2nd ACPI child device you see. Next, expand the PCI bus.
> Can you find the device(s) in question? How are they connected? Post a screen shot

Right, here's the drive showing as connected.

ComputerGeek said:

Also, Run 32- or 64- bit version of DevManView depending on if you run a 32 or 64 bit Windows OS. In DevManView, click Options
> select Show Non-Plug and Play Drivers
> Select Show Header Line
Now click Ctl-A to select all, Ctl-S to save. BEFORE saving you MUST change the file Save As type pull down menu (towards bottom of the window) to: Tab Delimited Text. Save the file and upload to your next post

/* EDIT */
Let the snapshot capture the parent/child relationship of your mystery device back up to it reaches the PCI bus (and/ or any other type of bus enumerator it may be connected to)

I've included the file below. Having looked at DevManView's report it has confirmed that the WPD that was showing up was indeed a Kingston flash drive (the one I mentioned earlier), it also shows up as drive L: which is the drive letter assigned to the weird drive. So it does indeed appear that all of this is a result of me toying around with applying ASUS' AI Suite III's USB3.0 Boost feature to a flash drive that was attached at the time.

I'm still baffled as to why these still show as connected when the drive isn't actually plugged in though. I have a couple of workarounds in mind that I'll have to try.





DevManView Screenshot.txt