Write Error with USB 1.1 External Harddrive

[Billy]

A friend of mine has reported an issue with an external
USB harddrive. He tried to rename the drive and
afterward, could no longer write to the drive. Specifics:
Win XP, USB 1.1, 80g maxtor in Bytec external enclosure.
XP reports unable to find path to drive, write fails.
If he disconnects the drive and reconnects it to another
XP machine, he can write to it OK. Already tried the
obvious: reformat, rename, uninstall drive, uninstall
USB, delete Catroot.
Reply to billydreynolds(removethis)@hotmail.com

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Did you try Disk Management to see if you can do anything with the
drive? Right click on My Computer and click Manage. Now click on Disk
Management. You should be able to check the settings for it and assign
a drive letter, etc. You may need to import it if it is a dynamic disk.

Nathan McNulty

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Here are three other things that I can think of. First, is this drive
set to DMA mode or is it still stuck in PIO mode? Under Device Manager,
make sure the drive is set to DMA mode. Second, you may need to use the
MaxBlast software to set up the drive properly (this means connecting it
inside your computer before using the external casing). Try setting it
up this way and see if the problem still exists. Finally, it could be
your hardware meaning either the USB ports, cable, or external casing.
The casing may not be providing a good 5v supply to the HD, or maybe not
providing a good 12v to the internal board. Try a different cable and
see if that helps, and finally, see if a new USB 2.0 PCI card helps (if
not you can always return it)

Also, the reason you get the High Speed Device in non-High speed Hub is
because your drive can handle USB 2.0, but the hub is only USB 1.1. You
will be much happier with USB 2.0 as it transfers 60 MB/s whereas, USB
1.1 does 1.5 MB/s. Check out this link too:

http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/ntfs-pf.htm

Nathan McNulty

 

[Guest]

Thanks Nathan, for taking time to respond.
1) In my XP Device Manager, only the Asus MB drive controller (prim or sec) can be set for DMA etc. The drives do not have this option available. In XP it is a function of the mb controller not the drives.
2) The drive was properly setup (Maxtor recommends using XP bootup CD to reformat to NTFS unless the drive is larger than 160GB) and functioning on this system as well as several others. It still works fine on two systems, but not the Laptop. The Laptop works fine with other USB devices.
This rules out: bad drive, partitioning, formatting, dma, pio, USB ports, cable, external casing or power.
3) I am aware that "High Speed Device in non-High speed Hub is because your drive can handle USB 2.0, but the hub is only USB 1.1" is not an error message. The Laptop is an older model without USB 2. The external drive worked fine at low speed until the user tried to rename the drive.

I beleive that the Catroot entry for the drive is corrupted on the Laptop. I renamed the catroot directories in the system32 directory and forced WINXP to rebuild them at boot. Then reinstalled the HUB and Externl drive. The drive shows up in My Computer and Device Manager but is missing from Disk Manager.
Attempts to write to or from it are unsuccessful. I appreciate the time you spend responding.
Any other Ideas?

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Have you thought about doing a repair installation? Boot off the XP CD,
choose install, chose R to Repair, and let it do its thing. Seems like
you have tried most everything else. And yes, the DMA if available
should be under the ATA\ATAPI Devices-Primary (or Secondary) IDE
Controller

Nathan McNulty