Strange issue with my Pen Drives.

[dbgarza]

I'm having some odd issue when it comes to pendrives on my PC since a few days ago.

I plug the USB pendrive on the USB port and Windows 7 recognizes it correctly, it even assigns the drive letter and even appears on Windows Explorer, but when I double click on it to see its contents it doesn't responds, plus when I try to eject it, it doesn't responds neither.

This happened to me with my two pendrives, one is a Sandisk Cruzer Micro and the other is a Transcend Jetflash V3. When I plug them the light on them blinks in a intermittent way like trying to work but no go.

If I plug any other devices like printers, mouse, keyboard, my gamepad, scanner, all they work flawlessly. The issue is just with the pen drives.

The odd thing is that I turn off the PC and then turn it on and the pen drives now work correctly, I can access to their contents and all and they remain working all the time I keep the PC turned on after this.

What do you think it can be the problem?

 

[Johnathan Lyman]

Do the drives work alright on other computers?

If I am to understand correctly, the machine seems to freeze when trying to access the drive but when it is restarted, it works fine? Is this first attempt coming from a cold boot (being off)?

Also, do any other flash drives do this? How about usb-based hard drives? card readers? (if you have any of the others to test, of course)

 

[dbgarza]

The pen drives work flawlessly on other computers, I know it because during the time the issue started, I had 2 other computers (one deskop and one Laptop) here to check them (I repair computers, virus, spyware, build desktop from scratch aka the white box or non brand ones, and that stuff), so I checked the pen drives on them and they worked fine.


The computer doesn't freezes as in nothing responding, I just double click on the pen drive icon on Windows Explorer and it tries to open it (address bar on Windows Explorer starts to fill up with that green progress bar similar to when you search for files), but does nothing, I click on the icon on the tray to eject it and it doesn't ejects it, I have to unplug-it manually after turn off the PC. Good thing that for some reason the pen drive in the policies for its disk drive on the device manager was set on quick remove aka that I can unplug it without use the safely remove thing instead of being configured for performance.

Now the issue on my computer comes after the computer has been turned off during 8 hours or so. I just turn it on, all goes fine, no errors during boot, no warning messages, no nothing, and when I plug a pen drive I get the issue. I turn off the computer fully and then turn it on again and now the pen drives work.

Kinda odd isn't it?

I haven't tested any other pen drives other than the two I have and with both I get this issue.

Still I already put a buy order for a USB ports PCI card and a USB extension cable, this to see if the issue is only with the USB ports that are built-in on the motherboard or if is something messed up in the Windows installation and on the way to get a few extra USB ports.

Still I would like to know your thoughts about my issue since other than that, all works perfectly fine on my computer. Actually this year I put a few new things to it like a 500 GB SATA disk, a 550 Watts Power Supply, a new CPU fan (it runs at 3000 RPM when clean keeping my CPU at a nice temp ^^) and a new video card which boosted my game graphics assement rate from 3.2 to 5.7, so as you see I keep in top shape as much as I can, since being I in the tech support and repair business, I sure know how to keep it on shape.

But well, still that doesn't means one can win 'em all when it comes to know how to solve some issues

 

[EzioAuditore]

Can you open the drive via other programs like WinRar etc, without getting stalled ofcourse?

Also, When you plug the drives, open device manager, uninstall the device, and select 'scan for hardware changes' from the Action menu. May be that could do someting. Doesn't hurt to try.

 

[Golden]

Hi,

I think I'm off the mark here, and certainly don't know what their function is, but could it be one of those "Legacy USB" settings one finds in the BIOS by any chance?

Regards,
Golden

 

[dbgarza]

@EzioAuditore: I didn't tried to access it through WinRar or other programs, this because since I see the light on the pendrive blinking like trying to react, I didn't wanted to risk the pen drives to end damaged. I will try tomorrow that since right now the ports are working since I did the turn off and turn on of the computer since it gave the issue several hours ago and after that the ports haven't failed so far all this time I had the computer working.

@Golden: Legacy USB? mind explain a bit more about it? is just that my bios has its default settings loaded, only thing I moved was to set the boot order and for the PC to not show the Biostar (my motherboard's brand) logo when turning on the PC and instead show the detection of the hard disks and DVD drives I have. Other than that I didn't moved anything else.

 

[Golden]

@Golden: Legacy USB? mind explain a bit more about it? is just that my bios has its default settings loaded, only thing I moved was to set the boot order and for the PC to not show the Biostar (my motherboard's brand) logo when turning on the PC and instead show the detection of the hard disks and DVD drives I have. Other than that I didn't moved anything else.

Well, I've seen some settings in the BIOS which enable something called "Legacy USB", in fact, I believe its a standard setting to have them enabled anyway, so unless you've changed something I doubt its the problem, but I wanted to see whether you had changed soemthing there.

I can't claim to know what that setting does, but I think it is primarily used to cater for USB enabled mice/keybaords prior to a USB enabled OS loading.....I just wondered if that could be an issue.

 

[dbgarza]

Well I doubt that is the issue since I had the USB emulation as my bios calls it since always and I never got problems with it before.

 

[dbgarza]

Seems the issue is the USB ports themselves. I just bought a PCI USB ports card (4 external ports + 1 internal) and with that one the pendrives work flawlessly.

Seems my brother in law was right about the ports having voltage problems. While not enough for any device to not work, it is enough for the pendrives to not work being them storage devices.