Another hard drive

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 3:42 pm

I have three external hard drives that I use with my computers (mainly for making backups and for temporary storage).

I use Firewire, but the enclosures all support both Firewire and USB to give me the flexibility to connect them to just about any computer. With my computers, I have never had any problems with a drive disappearing after it was mounted, but I have seen this on one lower-end computer (an old 800MHz PIII) when using a USB 2.0 connection.

The solution for the system that had the problem was to use the PCI Latency Tool to change the latency of the PCI video card and the USB host controller. Increasing the latency value permits the device in question to hold onto the bus for a longer period of time.

Another possible problem with external USB hard drives is that you might exceed the available power or bandwidth of the USB bus. The bus is a shared resource, and if a device hogs bandwidth, some devices may not be able to cope with that and drop out. Similarly, many USB devices are bus-powered (mice, keyboards, webcams, even some external hard drives and flatbed scanners), and if the bus can't supply enough power, a device can drop out. You can see the bandwidth and power usage from Device Manager by going to the Advanced tab of the USB Host Controller and the Power tab of the USB Root Hub, respectively.

matt pacchetti · Post by **matt pacchetti** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 6:10 pm

Well I stayed up half the night messing with it and gave up and went to bed. After a pot of coffee I decided to try again and for some reason it worked and it worked great. Dont ask me why .
Thanyou you all for the help .

matt

maddrummer3301 · Post by **maddrummer3301** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 11:22 pm

>>>One big culprit I smell here it that I use Win2000 Pro.
I still have a partition with 2000 on it, I'll check it out and let you know the results.

I don't know for sure but maybe getting up to the latest service pack of 2000 will cure the issue. In the meantime try putting a shortcut on the
C: drive or one of the drives you can see and make the shortcut point to a directory on the external usb drive.
Just right click and drag on the external drive or a sub-directory on the external drive and drop it on the C Drive, when you let up on the mouse button select "Create Shortcut".

MD

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 7:37 am

Just to make it clear again, I was just testifying in reply to the original post that I saw that behaviour also.
I am not using an external drive with VS at all.

But I will still add this for reference:
I have the latest service pack to Windows,
the test was done with no other USB device connected,
and I tried an USB key drive as mentioned above, it didn't show either.

Now let's go back to trying out VS10.
(Funny, they don't let you try the standard version , will that be delivered as the old SE version with hardware?)