SOLVED: External USB drive has disappeared

[JCRoswell]

This morning my external USB hard drive that I use for backups disappeared from my PC. It has been working fine since I bought it in October of 2014, but this morning I got a message that the J drive needed to be formatted (that's the drive letter I assigned to it). I declined that, of course, and rebooted hoping that it was some glitch, but upon rebooting the drive won't appear at all. Not in Windows Explorer, Disk Manager, or Device Manager (as far as I can tell). I'm pretty sure I haven't made any changes to the system since I last saw it appear in Windows Explorer.

Things I tried:
1. Rebooting a few times. Didn't work.
2. Plugging into a direct USB port instead of a hub. Didn't work.
3. Unplugging and replugging the cable. Didn't work.

What did work was hooking it up to my laptop. It saw it just fine and I could see that all of the expected data was on there still. So it looks to be confined to my desktop.

Here are some of the details of my system:
Dell Studio 540, Intel Core2 Quad CPU, 2.5GHz, 8GB RAM
Windows 7 SP1 64 bit
External enclosure - Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA enclosure
External drive - Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD, SATA 6 GB/s
USB connectors - USB 2.0 (the enclosure is 3.0, but it is supposed to be backwards compatible and has had no issues until today)

My laptop is Windows 8.1 by the way with 3.0 USB ports.

One other point - I noticed in the Device Manager that one of the USB controllers had a Code 43 error. I hunted down a solution on Microsoft's website and it fixed it. I couldn't tell you whether that was the specific controller for the external HDD or not, but nothing has changed since being fixed.

Any help would be appreciated as it's not a good feeling to have my backup drive disappear.

Thanks,
John

 

[JCRoswell]

Solved it. I started having problems with other USB items so I changed my focus from the hard drive to the USB ports. Some things still worked (wireless keyboard and mouse, dongle for software) but others didn't (music keyboard, iPhone). Here's the solution I found:

*** Turn off the computer and disconnect the power cable for over a minute. ***

Crazy solution, but it worked. Evidently whatever had caused an issue was stuck in that state and as long as it could maintain some level of power it would stay that way. I guess once it was disconnected from power for a sufficient time it got reset.

Now I can add another troubleshooting method to my bag of tricks. I'll file it under: "Things that will fix your problems, but you'll never know why."

 

[bols59]

Solved it. I started having problems with other USB items so I changed my focus from the hard drive to the USB ports. Some things still worked (wireless keyboard and mouse, dongle for software) but others didn't (music keyboard, iPhone). Here's the solution I found:

*** Turn off the computer and disconnect the power cable for over a minute. ***

Crazy solution, but it worked. Evidently whatever had caused an issue was stuck in that state and as long as it could maintain some level of power it would stay that way. I guess once it was disconnected from power for a sufficient time it got reset.

Now I can add another troubleshooting method to my bag of tricks. I'll file it under: "Things that will fix your problems, but you'll never know why."

I know it's been eight years since you left this post, but I wanted to thank you for it. It solved the problem that was consuming my worry; I thought all my USB drives were wonky. Or worse yet, the plug in on the side of my laptop had gone South.