No External HDDs Functional on Laptop (USB Thumb drives OK)

francescocastel · 18 Jul 2014

Hey guys, need some help. I'm at work at the moment, and an issue has arisen that has bothered me before, but I had not had the need to follow up on it. Upon connecting any external hard-drive, my computer fails to acknowledge the drive in My Computer. Disk Management detects the presence of the hard drives, however they are not assigned a drive letter/path. Right-clicking the volume does not allow me to manually assign one (the option is grayed out).

In Control Panel (Devices and Printers) they are given generic names such as "Expansion" or "External HDD". In the Properties menu, information such as "Manufacturer" or "Model Number" or "Description" are apparently "unavailable". They claim to be working correctly.

This issue has affected all external hard drives I have used- a Seagate and a WD. I have attempted connecting them to both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports on my computer but to no avail.

krustykobb · 18 Jul 2014

francescocastel said:

Hey guys, need some help. I'm at work at the moment, and an issue has arisen that has bothered me before, but I had not had the need to follow up on it. Upon connecting any external hard-drive, my computer fails to acknowledge the drive in My Computer. Disk Management detects the presence of the hard drives, however they are not assigned a drive letter/path. Right-clicking the volume does not allow me to manually assign one (the option is grayed out).

In Control Panel (Devices and Printers) they are given generic names such as "Expansion" or "External HDD". In the Properties menu, information such as "Manufacturer" or "Model Number" or "Description" are apparently "unavailable". They claim to be working correctly.

This issue has affected all external hard drives I have used- a Seagate and a WD. I have attempted connecting them to both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports on my computer but to no avail.

You could try uninstalling the hard drive in device manager, unplug the external hard drive and plug it back in again to let windows find the drivers for it again; this might help as I had a similar issue once and this resolved it for me

francescocastel · 18 Jul 2014

I have tried that, unfortunately it yields the same results. Thanks for the help, it's greatly appreciated.

krustykobb · 18 Jul 2014

francescocastel said:

I have tried that, unfortunately it yields the same results. Thanks for the help, it's greatly appreciated.

No worries, have you tried to assign a drive letter through diskpart in command prompt?

TVeblen · 18 Jul 2014

You may need to reset the information Windows keeps for your USB controllers ("reset the stack").

Open Device Manager > expand the "USB Serial Bus Controllers" (To make this process easier, disconnect all USB connected devices except for keyboard and mouse)
Now right click on each item under "Universal Serial Bus Controllers" > choose: Uninstall
After uninstalling all devices, restart the computer.

Upon restart Windows will reload all the devices fresh. Now check to see if the drives are recognized normally.

Note: if you have a seperate USB 3.0 controller and drivers (XHCI Controllers) you do not need to or want to uninstall those. Only try that if the method above does not work.