External HDD detected on other computers, only SOMETIMES detected on main PC?

[Xzfgiiimtsath]

I've been having a very frustrating problem lately. I've had a 2TB Western Digital "My Book" external HDD for a couple years now and never had any issues with it, until I started trying to use it on my wife's computer (running Windows 10 Pro). I pretty much only keep music on it, and occasionally, when I'd try to play a song in Foobar, the program would crash. When I tried to browse the drive in File Explorer, it would crash. When I restart after this happens, the drive is no longer in File Explorer, but still detected in Device Manager and still listed in my connected devices. It's also detected in Disk Management, but usually needs to be "initialized." On trying to initialize, I get a message saying I've got a fatal hardware error. Sometimes disk management takes a minute to find it, and when it does, it looks like this, and needs to be initialized. http://i.imgur.com/xnA6FU0.png

Now, all of this would normally make me think the drive is just dying. However, the drive works TOTALLY FINE on my wife's laptop (also running Windows 10). Absolutely nothing weird about its behavior, doesn't seem to have any trouble doing anything. Whatever the problem is, it seems to be specific to this computer. And the worst part is, it happens totally at random. Sometimes after a few replugs and restarts it will randomly work, and then a few hours later my music player will crash, I restart, and it's gone again.

I've updated all my drivers, tried assigning a drive letter in disk management (it wont let me), tried changing the drive letter on the computer it works on, which got it to work on the other computer for a bit, but it eventually quit again. My USB ports seem to work fine and the HDD does the same thing no matter which one I plug it into, but I do get a CONSTANT popup in the bottom right of my screen telling me that a USB device isn't being recognized, even when no USB devices are plugged in... that may be related.

Lot of text and complicated problem, I know, but I really don't want to send off this PC without trying something myself first.

EDIT: While sitting at the computer, I had a File Explorer window randomly pop up with the contents of the HDD on it, when I had not been able to access it a few minutes before. Why would my ability to access this drive on this computer only randomly shut on and off?

SOLVED?: After searching through Event Viewer I saw the error "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\DR3" repeatedly. On googling this, I found a thread for someone with a similar problem with an internal drive. All he did to fix the issue was download fresh copy of the HDD's driver, uninstall the old one, and manually restart the new one. Since WD drives apparently don't need external drivers, I simply unplugged the HDD, went to Device Manager, uninstalled the driver for "USB Mass Storage Device," restarted my computer, and plugged the HDD back in. It seems to be working for the time being.

Thanks!

FINAL EDIT: Same problem again after listening to maybe 2 songs on the drive. Back to the drawing board.

 

[Ralston18]

You may be able to find additional information via the Event Viewer logs.

Especially so where the drive works on one computer and not the other.

Look at your "problem" PC's Event Viewer logs and look for errors, warnings, information, etc.. related to the disk drive - see what you find.

And you can then go to your wife's computer and see if those same errors, warnings, information, appear there.

Log entries on your computer and not hers are likely to be relevant to problem(s). See what you can find.

Event Viewer is overwhelming if you have not looked at the logs before. However, you will quickly see how log entries are arranged and presented. You do not need to change anything or immediately react to something you find or otherwise question. Just look about at first....

Right-clicking a log entry will provide more details. Again error codes or specific warnings are what you are seeking. That information can be googled accordingly to see what, if anything, turns up.