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External USB hard drive hot plug requires reboot
I recently purchased 6 low end hard drive enclosures, "PT Brand"
PT-350U2-BL enclosures that were on special. All 6 are USB 2.0 IDE interfaces. I installed 80 GB WD 7200 RPM drives in the enclosures, all set to "master" as specified by the manufacturer. All exhibit the same flaw: they are detected when first inserted into a USB port, but if I attempt to stop the device, remove the cable and reinsert the device, it will not be recognized. I cannot attach the same device or another of the 6 devices. I can insert any other USB device without a problem. I can insert these drives once per boot cycle. The only way to fix this behavior is to reboot the machine; after that I can plug any of the six drives into a USB port and it will be recognized, but I cannot plug any one of these devices in a second time. A few notes: (*) This has been tested on two XP machines and a 2003 server. All exhibit the same behavior. (*) All systems have the latest service packs and hot fixes installed (*) Three other models of external disk enclosures work without a problem (*) I am using the "Safely Remove Hardware" wizard to eject the drives (*) The drives are not present in the disk manager following the second insertion. There are no drive letter conflicts. Granted these are cheap pieces of junk, but I am having trouble getting a response from the vendor. I'd like to determine the cause of the issue but my instincts tell me that this is purely a hardware design flaw that I may not be able to work around (given the fact that all 6 exhibit the same behavior). Hopefully this is not the case. |
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External USB hard drive hot plug requires reboot
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External USB hard drive hot plug requires reboot
Thanks for the tip. Looks like that was it. It turned out that I had
used non-WD jumpers that were a bit shorter than the originals. All the drives were set to dual channel master, so I used needle nosed pliers to remove the jumpers and the plastic came off but the bits of metal were still lodged in the back of the jumper housing. Bizarre - that's a first for me. Just took me a day to cool off and use someone's fresh perspective. Thanks for the recommendation - they're hot plugging now. Note that Western Digital hard drives really have 3 jumper settings: Single, Master and Slave. When used as a single drive, whilst even in an USB enclosure, the drive is unjumpered as a Single. Open one of the USB enclosures and test with the HD setting as "single", or unjumpered. |
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