Weird USB external disk/caddy recognition problem

Avoriaz

I apologise for the long post.

I have a Dell laptop running XP.

I have two external USB IDE/PATA disk caddies.

One caddy is a Rapsody RSH-100 multimedia jukebox. The other is just a standard disk caddy.

Both connect via USB and are seen by the laptop as external mass storage devices.

I have two IDE/PATA 250gb disk drives, a Maxtor and a Samsung.

The disks have about 1,000 music video files stored on them. I use the Rapsody to play these videos on my TV and Hi-Fi. Both disks contain the same files. One is essentially a back up copy though I do swap them occasionally to balance out usage. I have a third back up copy of the files elsewhere as the files are irreplaceable.

Everything was fine for a few years. XP instantly recognised each caddy and disk when I first connected them. It automatically installed them as USB mass storage devices and, when connected, they appeared in Windows Explorer as normal so I could add and delete files etc. I could connect both at the same time and they would both appear in Windows Explorer. Either disk would work in either caddy.

Whenever I did a fresh XP install, the caddies were again instantly recognised when connected.

However, recently the laptop has decided that it is unable to recognise the Maxtor drive when it is in the Rapsody caddy. It will recognise the Samsung disk when in the Rapsody caddy, and will recognise either disk when in the other caddy, but it refuses to see the Maxtor when it is in the Rapsody caddy.

Normally all that is required is to connect the caddy to a USB port and power it on. XP automatically sees it, allocates a drive letter and displays it in Windows Explorer.

Now when I connect the Rapsody/Maxtor, nothing happens. It doesn’t see it. It doesn’t show in “Manage”. As far as XP is concerned it isn’t there.

Yet the Maxtor works fine in the other caddy, and the Samsung works fine in either.

Why should Rapsody/Samsung, Caddy/Samsung and Caddy/Maxtor combinations all work automatically and faultlessly but Rapsody/Maxtor is just not recognised. It isn’t even seen as an unknown device. It gets no reaction at all.

I have lived with the problem for a few months hoping that a planned XP reinstall would solve the problem. I have just bought a new internal disk for my laptop and done a fresh XP install on that. But still the problem persists.

As far as I know I am on the latest Dell BIOS and all the drivers etc are up to date and working.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this curious problem?

fwor

Did you try the troublesome caddy before installing SP3 and the latest Windows updates onto the new HDD?

Reason I ask is that a "customer" of mine had a similar-looking problem a few weeks ago, with two of her USB devices suddenly not being recognised, irrespective of which USB port they were in. Two other USB devices would work fine.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect that at some point in the past a Windows Update has caused USB problems, but only under certain conditions (or perhaps only for certain chipsets).

In her case, just uninstalling the USB ports and hubs in device manager and then letting them get re-installed at reboot got all of the devices working properly, without (fingers crossed) any problem since.

Avoriaz

Thanks Fwor

SP3 did cause me a few minor problems. It screwed up my preferred Windows Explorer view. I like to see “details” in every folder but SP3 keeps reverting to “thumbnails” every time I reboot.

Because of that, when I installed XP on my new disk a few days ago I didn’t install SP3 so I am currently on SP2 but I still have the caddy/disk recognition problem. I had hoped that a fresh install of XP on a new disk without SP3 would solve the caddy/ disk recognition problem but unfortunately it hasn’t. On the plus side, SP2 doesn’t screw up my preferred folder views.

However I will still try your idea of uninstalling the USB hubs and ports and see if that helps. Hopefully that won’t screw up my system totally.

That won’t matter too much. I have two spare 2.5 inch disks for the laptop, both of which have XP SP3 loaded and it only takes a few minutes to swap the disks over and reboot. I’m only half way through tailoring my new install to my personal preferences so I won’t lose too much by starting again.

I am going to avoid SP3 as I don’t think there is anything I need in it. I have installed a load of other updates that came through last night. I think they were mostly patches for the recent IE security issue. I rarely use IE as I prefer Firefox.

Thanks for your suggestion. It is appreciated. I will try it later and post the results.