Tecra M10 USB need formatting before use

[a_skywalker5]

Hi all,

This is a problem I have been facing for about one month.
I've already asked help to the Microsoft support and I manage to circumstance the problem, unfortunately without being able to solve it.
The problem is the following:

Every time I plug an external hard drive via USB I am asked to format it before using it. This of course I do not want to do. This problem appeared all of a sudden, before everything was working perfectly.

My external hard drives work perfectly in other enclosures namely other laptops.

Additionally, if I reboot Windows 7 in the "safe mode" I can connect the external hard drives via USB without problems. It appears it is something I've got recently which is conflicting to my external hard drives.

Could it be any Toshiba update? Do you have any idea about things I could try to locate the problem?

I thank you in advance.
Cheers
Andrea

[assex]

Hi Andrea

Do you have Toshiba external Hdd or Toshiba laptop? I ask this because you ask for Toshiba update.

[a_skywalker5]

Hello,

I have a Toshiba laptop (Tecra M10).
I think last updates I did were for Toshiba Tempro and Wireless driver.

[MasterG]

I cannot imagine that this could be caused by any driver updates…
I read some articles about similar Win 7 issues and sometimes this happens with drive enclosures used to recover data from multiple HDD types.
Try this short workaround:

- Connect external HDD and open Device Manager.
- Search for USB Mass Storage Device under Universal Serial Bus Controllers and double-click it.
- click on the Driver tab and Update Driver.
- choose Browse my computer for software and then “Let me pick from a list of device drivers”.
- click Have Disk and the Browse.
- navigate to the C:\Windows\inf directory and scroll down to usbstor.inf. then click Open and OK.
- click Next.

This should help to update the driver but this does not solve always the issue… however, its worth a try…

[a_skywalker5]

Hello there !

Thanks a lot for the nice tip. Indeed, I really think you spotted the problem but actually it did not work. Can I try somethin else like USBport.sys instead of USBstor.sys ??
Cheers
Andrea

[MasterG]

> . Can I try somethin else like USBport.sys instead of USBstor.sys ??
Don’t think it would made a difference but you can try it…

But does the “HDD format message” appears using other external HDD drives or just only this HDD?

[a_skywalker5]

It appears with every HDD I plug in, a Kingston's, a SanDisk's and a Lacie's one. I tried the other one but it did not work :-(

[Tonny]

Hi

I read that this can happen if you did not remove the external USB HDD or flash memory stick using the option ““safely remove””.

You could try to use an open source utility called TestDisk.
Here the instruction how to use it:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

You could write a partition table changes and then exit the application and unplug and plug again the USB flash memory or HDD…

Otherwise I would test these HDDs / memory stick with fresh recovered system…