Where are the drives ?

Greetings, recently after a lightning strike and a new motherboard I have purchased an external drive for back up. I am using Win.Live one care to back up my files regularly to the external drive. About a week ago I got a message that the back up has failed. The external drive was not showing up. After rebooting it was back. It happened a couple more times and now even rebooting does not bring the drive back. I also noticed that I am no longer able to read flash drives in the USB ports or memory Compact flash cards from my camera. I checked the device manager and am not getting any error messages. Where do I start to troubleshoot that problem??

Hello lutra,

It happened a couple more times and now even rebooting does not bring the drive back. I also noticed that I am no longer able to read flash drives in the USB ports or memory Compact flash cards from my camera.

I suggest you may like to download USBDeview to clear your USB ports and try again to see if your External Hard Drive is showing for you to backup as usual.

Keep us posted and ask any more questions you feel appropriate to your inquiry.

kind regards,

Hello,
While this fix is used more for optical drives, the hardware filters can block USB drives from loading the drivers (and Windows can not see them).
This would also effect flash drives.
Click Start then Run and type regedit…click "Ok"

In the left pane, expand (click +) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then SYSTEM, then CurrentControlSet, then Control, then Class, and click on {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Right click on {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} and choose Export. Name this file "filters" and save it to your desktop. This file can be deleted when it is determined it is no longer needed.

In the right pane, if either UpperFilters or LowerFilters are present, right click on it and choose Delete…accept the deletion. Delete both if they are both present.

Close Registry Editor and reboot.

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Post back with how things are going after doing the above.

Thank you, got the USBDeview but I am not sure what I was looking for what to do with it. Have removed the upper and lower filters in the registry and it helped quite a bit. I can see again the flash drive and one of the two front USB ports is reading a memory stick.It is showing up as drive K: on the View enclosed. There are 4 USB ports in the back of the computer, one has the Canon printer (MX850) in and is working. I have put the external HD usb connection in all of them with no response, I have also put the HD USB connection into the drive K: port that reads the flash drive with no success. The light is on and the External HD has the power connected, what else should I check?? The second USB port in the front is not reading any flash drives. Regards Michael

Hi lutra, For me, I delete repetitive USB links showing in USBdeview, reboot, and Windows always picks up drivers I need, but I am not asking you to do that, as I see there are repetitive inclusions for you mass storage which is indeed the Removable Hard Drive you first enquired about. I particularly find the software helpful with repetive USB connections and if I don't keep them disabled or deleted, my digital camera does not show connected to transfer new pictures to Picasa2. Post back if you need to ask more questions, as another volunteer will come by to assist also. kind regards,