Brighty wrote:
In reply to "Paul" who wrote the following:

Brighty wrote:
I have a USB 2.0 WD My Passport Essential SE drive which I use with my Win 7
laptop. I always ignored a prompt on every USB plug in to repair the file
system
as it worked fine. But my new Win 8 PC refuses to see it in File Explorer,
it
appears and disappears constantly, playing the four tone chime over and
over. So
I repaired its file system on the Win 7 machine and now it starts without
complaint there, but still no luck in Win 8. The Win 8 PC offered to repair
it
once, and I accepted but it stopped a third of the way through, and Win 8
now no
longer offers to repair.

I have the latest 64 bit WD driver on the Win 8 PC, using different USB
slots
make no difference. I've tried a new USB cable which is good with other
peripherals. I have a lot of data on the drive, so a reformat is not on the
table. I have another external USB 2.0 drive which loads in Win 8 with no
difficulty.

Is Win 8 so fussy? Any help will be appreciated, I can raise it with WD, but
I'm
not sure that it's a drive problem.

Properties as shown in Win 8:
Device
USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_WD&Prod_My_Passport_071A&Rev_2019 \57584A314137304832383737&
0
was configured.

Driver Name: disk.inf
Class GUID: {4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Driver Date: 06/21/2006
Driver Version: 6.2.9200.16384
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Section: disk_install.NT
Driver Rank: 0xFF0006
Matching Device ID: GenDisk
Outranked Drivers: disk.inf:GenDisk:00FF2002
Device Updated: false

Thanks
John
A few observations:

1) This could be a 2.5 inch drive, drawing all hard
drive power from the USB bus.
2) Excessive drive power consumption, will cause the
bus voltage to drop, the drive to spin down and spin up
again, you get "chimes" when the drive is detected again.
If that happens in the middle of CHKDSK, you're in trouble.
3) You need to ensure it isn't a power problem.

USB2 limits bus power to 500mA. Depending on the computer
type (laptop or desktop), the electrical circuit isn't nearly
as stingy as the specification suggests. Some of them, you
can draw 1000mA, before the self-resetting fuse opens up.

If you were to read the specs for the internal drive mechanism
itself, some of those draw 1000mA during spinup, then much
less current when in steady state. And that means, spec-wise,
we're in limbo. A few of the drives are at 500mA max, and
those are less likely to be an issue.

To see if this is a drive problem, you could remove it
from the casing. Some of these pre-packaged drives from
WD and Seagate, the packaging is designed to thwart easy
removal. If I need to "remove an enclosure" from the equation,
pulling the drive and connecting it to my desktop
SATA cabling, allows testing the drive directly.

*******

Another observation for you, is portable storage encourages
aggressive spin-down policies. That means the product has
internal settings, telling it to spin down after five seconds
of dis-use. This is hard on the drive, if done with aggression.
It is frequently used as a "cooling" solution, so the drive
can be sealed right up, and still remain cool.

The drive mechanism itself could be failing. And then it would
be hard to tell apart the various kinds of possible faults.

Now, if the computer had USB3 ports (powder blue plastic), you
were using Windows 8 USB3 drivers, I might believe it to be a
driver problem of some sort. If on the other hand, everything
in that path is USB2, a much older driver might be involved
(proven code and architecture), and Microsoft would be
"off the hook". I've heard a few complaints, when comparing
the third-party USB3 drivers, to the Microsoft driver for USB3,
so that's a possibility. But the root of the
problem just as easily, could be a non-reliable power problem,
or a drive mechanism about to fail. Perhaps if all the
OS observations were done on exactly the same computer
hardware, we could eliminate the bus power as an issue.
But if comparing two different computers, anything is
possible.

It's too bad these products, don't have an indicator light
to warn us of power problems. It's sure not a technology problem.
Just a lack of imagination.

Paul

Hello Pauk,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. The Win 8 machine is a Sony Fit i7 with two USB
3.0 ports, I've tried both, and one is a charging port so I'll rule out a power
supply issue. The drive works faultlessly streaming video to a Merlin jukebox
style unit which also doesn't power it.

Heavy file transfers have dropped once or twice in the past to the drive from my
Win 7 laptop (netbook, actually), but I had put that down to lack of processing
power in the netbook. I'm sure you're right that there could be signs of disk
failure, so I must take the data off and run WD software to check it.

I'll continue to look at drivers too, but the problem is that as the drive never
gets mounted, I can't use its Preferences settings to update on the Win 8 PC.

Thanks again,
John

So your powering is the opposite of what I expected. Your Win8 has USB3
with good power (but problems). Your Win7 has USB2 and potential bad
power, but it works. So power probably isn't the problem. The machine
with what looks like good power, has the problems.

You mention a WD 64 bit driver. Why is that necessary ? And
what is in that driver ? Do you have a link to that driver ?

For USB Mass Storage, the software provided by the OS should be
sufficient. I'm curious what problem the WD software is proposing
to solve.

Sometimes, freaky drive behavior is caused by power management
interactions. Check Device Manager and make sure there are no
"Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" boxes
that are ticked. Then try again. It's amazing how many points
in the computer, have power saving options, and those options
have the potential to make computer operation uneven. For a
laptop, some level of power saving is essential, such as down-clocking
the CPU and GPU when they're not being used. But other stuff is
just trivial. The difference between 4 hour battery life and
4.3 hour battery life, isn't worth some of the stingy settings
they use.

There have been enclosures, where the enclosure tells the drive
to spin down (to save power, reduce heat), and then the OS lacks
something to tell the drive to spin up again. Again, all part of power
management. And the user might be convinced it was an OS driver,
when it was just two bad designs bumping heads. With the enclosures,
you might not have any control over the spin-down behavior. Apparently,
it's in the drive firmware. And it's unclear whether you can issue the
appropriate IDE command, to make it stop.

Paul