- Jul 13, 2016
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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.
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.
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