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    Strange exteral HDD problem

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Syberia, Jan 7, 2012.

  1. Syberia

    Syberia Notebook Deity

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    I have a 500gb 2.5" HDD in an external Kingston USB enclosure. The drive was working fine until one day, seemingly randomly, Windows stopped detecting it. When I tried to access the drive in disk management, it was not there. I then booted into Ubuntu which does recognize the drive and was able to partition, format, and write to the drive without any problems. I tried the drive on another computer running Windows with the same result - the drive works properly. Suspecting some type of driver issue, I went into control panel and did a "scan for new hardware" and it detects something called "SNA-DC/U" but cannot locate drivers for it. I do not know if this is my external drive or not. I'm at a loss as to how to get the drive recognized again, please help.

    EDIT: According to Google, "SNA-DC/U" is indeed a Kingston USB-to-SATA device, but I cannot seem to find a driver for it, and I don't know why I'd need to - Windows recognized it automatically on another computer.

    EDIT2: I have tried uninstalling/reinstalling the device in control panel, and searching Windows Update for drivers. The process fails, but I don't know why. There are clearly drivers available.
     
    Syberia, Jan 7, 2012
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  2. GalaxySII

    GalaxySII Notebook Deity

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    Hi
    It might be a problem with kingston enclosure or usb power or drivers
    I had problem once says usb device not recognized ...
    and even chipset drivers can be wrong ..
    that's usualy problem when plenty software is installed in windows u don't know what causes the problem.
    Re-install windows that is the best way in my opinion ...
     
    GalaxySII, Jan 7, 2012
    #2
  3. Syberia

    Syberia Notebook Deity

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    Sure enough, on my tablet, this is detected as a Kingston SNA-DC/U USB device, and drivers were installed successfully. Is there any way to manually locate the driver used on the tablet and copy it to my desktop?

    I suspect there may be something wrong with my Windows installation. On my tablet, it uses "C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Disk.sys." On my desktop, in Windows Explorer, this file does exist, but when I tell it to install drivers from a manually specified location in Device Manager, it says it can't find the file.

    If there is a way to fix this, I'd love to know - I am not looking forward to having to reinstall Windows and re-configure everything just because I'm having driver problems.
     
    Syberia, Jan 7, 2012
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  4. Syberia

    Syberia Notebook Deity

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    I don't know what the problem was, but that was strange. New enclosure, same drive, everything works.
     
    Syberia, Jan 7, 2012
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  5. tilleroftheearth

    tilleroftheearth Wisdom listens quietly...

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    Yeah, enclosure's electronics went wonky...
     
    tilleroftheearth, Jan 7, 2012
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