USB Storage Drives Not Recognized, Code 39

[amf66]

Yesterday my external hard drive, flash drives, iPod, and memory card reader, which are all USB mass storage devices were working fine. However, today none of them show up in explorer, and when they're viewed in device manager all of them have an error message that says, "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)". I have already used system restore to go back to yesterday and it didn't solve the problem. Also, my flash drive is made by Sandisk and has a second partition that mounts as a CD drive, and this works properly. Does anyone have a solution to this problem? This is very bad for me because I can no longer back up my computer until it recognizes my external hard drive.

Thanks for the help!

Edit: I am using 64-bit Windows 7

 

[amf66]

I updated to the latest chipset drivers and the latest BIOS for my motherboard, but USB storage devices still won't mount. I'm at a loss. Perhaps something is wrong with my motherboard?

Here is a picture of what device manager looks like now. As you can see, the USB drives no longer have yellow error triangles next to them under the "Disk Drives" dropdown, but under "storage volumes" there is an equal number of generic volumes with yellow triangles as there are USB storage devices plugged in.

 

[Night Hawk]

There's no board fault being seen. Have you gone into the Disk Management tool or found generic usb devices listed in the Device Manager?

Often the usb controller drivers may need to be refreshed. You simply right click on the item in the device manager to select the uninstall option and follow that with a full restart of the system.

Another method is shutting everything down and unplugging the ac cord for the supply and press the power button to discharge the caps on the board as well as supply recycling power for both. Windows should reinstall the drivers fresh automatically on the following startup.

One of the MS answers postings is a listing of various things to try as well titled " External USB Hard Drive Stopped Working "

 

[amf66]

Thank you very much Night Hawk! Unplugging my computer and pressing the power switch a few times before I turned it back on fixed my problem!

 

[Night Hawk]

Great! Glad to hear it!

Sometimes you need to see everything refreshed in order to get Windows to work at detecting things properly again.

(Did that enough times for the older versions(98, XP) when connecting online by usb with the flaky old dsl setup. )