Windows 2000 Server: Mounting USB hard drives does not work

[George Ojeda]

Hi all,

I wanted to implement a backup mechanism on my Windows 2000 Server.
The server is fully patched and equipped with USB 2.0. Now I put
together an external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure with a slide out
tray. This way, I can slide out\in hard drives every few days to make
backups and to do it without shutting down the server (since this is
USB after all). Well there is a problem: it is not hotswappable.

I shut down the enclosure, drive disappears normally from the system -
no lockups. I slide out the HD, slide in another hard drive, then
power the enclosure back on.

The system recognizes the new drive (as per Device Manager) and the
drive registers itself properly under Disk Management complete with
correct drive letter and shown as healthy. The device also shows up
under the "Unplug or Eject Hardware). All seems normal.

The problem lies with explorer. When I open that up, all I get is a
picture of a HD icon with a question mark where the drive letter would
normally be. Other times, the drive do not appear in Explorer at all.

In other words, I cannot access the volume either through explorer nor
through a command prompt. In order for me to do so, I need to reboot
the server - which totally defeats the purpose of using an external
USB hard drive in the first place.

The system has all the service packs, patches, and drivers installed.
The same thing happens with USB 1.1 on the machine. One last thing,
the drive works flawlessly on an XP machine and hot-swaps beautifully.

Am I missing something? Or does Windows 2000 Server not handle USB
devices at all?

Thanks,
George

 

[chrisC]

HI George,
I'm sorry I don't have an answer but maybe we can compare
notes - I am having the same problem.

Mine is a UML USB 2.0 drive enclosure with a WD 80MB
drive. Works perfectly with XP except that the XP machine
reports that a 2.0 device is connected to a non-hispeed
port. It then works fine (a little on the slow side).
I took my USB enclosure to my computer shop and they
plugged it into a machine running Win2K, and it worked
fine.
I can only guess that the USB driver never updated or was
updated and shouldn't have been.
I'm running Win2K SP-4.

Does this shed any new light on the problem?

 

[chrisC]

Hi George,

This worked well on my Laptop XP machine BUT I just tried
it on another XP machine and got the following message
while trying to update the volume info from the drive. -
Volume information can not be found. This may happen if
the disk is a 1394 or a USB device on Windows 2000.

How about that?

Chris

 

[chrisC]

Hello again, George.

I uninstalled my motherboard's USB drivers and let SP4
install updated MS USB drivers - these are dated 11/14/99
Version 5.0.2183.1 (That doesn't sound so updatd does it?)
Anyway, I plug in the USB drive. double-click the
unistaller and see that the drive is correctly displayed
as generic drive H:. Close that. Open explorer - nothin'.
If I then unplug the drive, explorer comes right up. It
never does display drive H:
Right now I have the drive connected to my laptop
(slowmode) which is shared and connected to the network so
I can see it from the W2K box. OI!

can anyone shed any light on this????
chris