Strange USB Drive Showing in Device Manager

That may be the way to go as the drive in question is most definitely not connected.

I just had an idea

Burn a Knoppix Live CD (or use any other other free Linux variant). Look at the hardware IDs Linux reports (HW IDs are burned into device firmware. They're not Windows specific).

If you boot into an OS, and the OS reports that same USB id from Genesys, then you know that h/w is real and must be somewhere on your machine. Otherwise, not.

I think it should be straight forward. You just need to know the right Linux commands to create a hardware report. Unfortunately, i'm not a linux person. But if you post in one of the Linux forums, i'm sure some one could tell you how to do it

/* EDIT */
But should you did try a boot CD approach, you'd need make sure it support USB 3.0 since that device is showing up on the 3.0 controller

I'll just throw in this suggestion as it might show a hidden drive. (unlikely but you never know)

Any change in what you see if you set your folder view and empty drive view options like this?



I don't know if you want to install software? SIV - System Information Viewer

It's probably a shot in the dark and I'm no expert on this but it might give you more info to go on.

Download is a zip (siv.zip) for Windows 64bit. If you extract and run siv64x.exe as administrator or elevated it should work okay. Basically it presents a lot of information a lot of which I'm still struggling to understand.



However from what I can determine from your posts I reckon that if you click the PCI BUS dropdown list arrow near the bottom right of the window then Device Tree then Computer (top left) then click through each one of the Depth fields at the bottom of the window it might possibly give you a clue.



Or maybe one of the other options in the PCI BUS dropdown list?

ComputerGeek said:

One more thought.... You may have done something similar much earlier in the thread, but i want you to do the following step by step.

See if it has an affect on the WPD. See How to Safely Cleanup and Remove old USB Mass Storage drivers.

Right, tried this suggestion first. I used DriveCleanup to remove known working flash drives (all disconnected beforehand) then uninstalled the weird drive through Device Manager and ran DriveCleanup again. Here's the result.



As you can see the weird drive and the WPD have now disappeared after being uninstalled. I'll reboot now and I'll bet a pound to a penny that it reinstalls.







EDIT: Yep, upon reboot the non-existant drive reinstalls itself. The only USB peripherals I have connected are my keyboard and mouse. Nothing else is connected via USB. This is driving me mad now.

I haven't forgot this thread and I'll get back to it soon, not ignoring you in here people.

Right, I've been up to a few different things lately so haven't been digging into this, I think I needed another break from it. But before I start looking at Callender's suggestion and checking in Safe Mode there are a couple of things I've noticed while doing those other things that are relevant and make the problem even more puzzling.

I checked in my BIOS while setting my X.M.P. profile for my RAM and noticed that the USB 'device' is listed in there, I've since realised I do actually have an SD card reader on my case on the top panel. It's never been used though, maybe that's what it is? It does lend credence to what Geek mentioned earlier in the thread when you see what popped up as I created a Virtual Machine earlier this evening. The strange drive has now been renamed Generic USB Storage Device in Device Manager, how and when that happened I have no idea.
Unfortunately I couldn't screenshot my BIOS as it kept saying there was no compatible USB device present, even though there was. I give up.

I initially thought this was a Windows problem but it's obviously not. At least I something concrete to work with now instead of yyyyyyyy yyyy!





What I also noticed in my BIOS is that there were three keyboards listed. That really blew my mind as I've only ever used my SideWinder X4 on this rig. So I checked in Device Manager and double checked with Speccy and hey ho, what do you know? When did they appear? Your guess is as good as mine. I have absolutely no idea what's going on with this rig now.

YIPEEE! Feels good to actually crack a Windows mystery! And NO worry as to time to respond. As i said from the start "at your leisure" :)

Re: Safe Mode. Try but I don't believe it should make a difference. Safe Mode starts the minimal software needed for Windows to run. But that shouldn't affect PnP h/w detection. If it's a real device (not disabled by BIOS) Windows will still detect it

I've since realised I do actually have an SD card reader on my case on the top panel. It's never been used though, maybe that's what it is?

Absolutely! That's the card reader. Look back at post #34. It was identified as a Genesys card reader back then. Genesys re-confirmed by the snap shot of your VM message

The strange drive has now been renamed Generic USB Storage Device in Device Manager, how and when that happened I have no idea.

I think I can explain some of what you're seeing.

The disk name that appears in Device Manager is called the "Friendly Name" (and yes, "Friendly Name" is the technical term for it!). The USB Mass Storage driver generates its hardware IDs by first querying name information stored in device firmware. The name data received from the device is used by the driver when it generates the USBSTOR hardware ids

• Look at the Hardware IDs for the disk that belongs to the card reader. Back in #31 you only see underscores in the IDs (the lower snapshot). Windows is receiving non-printable characters for the name. My guess is the non-printing characters appear as underscores in the Hardware ids. They appear a those funny looking y's when displayed in Device Manager
• Look at the Hardware IDs for each of your disks now. You'll see the friendly name buried within the strings (I predict now INCLUDING the card reader disk drive)

I don't know why Windows seemed to receive unprintable characters before but seems to be correct now But that's the reason you're seeing the difference

/* EDIT */
Although, some underscore in USBSTOR Hardware Ids really ARE underscores! Of course, Windows just make that more confusing to tell which is which!