3 replies to this topic

[Fae]

Hi all,

I'm looking into an odd problem for a friend. He has a new Toshiba Satellite L650 running Windows 7, and he has an LG USB disk. The disk works fine in my computer and his old, but in his new one, when he plugs it into a port it will identify the device and display it as normal, but seconds later it will disappear. Then, it will re-register, will be displayed for a couple of seconds and then disappear again. This is independant of the USB port used.

I've never came accross anything like this before... I don't even know how to properly describe the problem. If it simply didn't show up, I would know how to diagnose it, but this is just... weird... Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance ^^

~Fae

[Alexander]

If it is a USB harddisk, then I suspect there is a slight issue with the USB powering within the laptop. USB devices like that tend to take a fair amount of power when in use, if even 1/4 of the 200mA is unavailable it may be faulty and disconnect periodically.

Does this happen when the AC adapter is plugged in?

[Fae]

Sorry, I wasn't clear on that. It's a USB pen-drive :) 4Gb,I think.
I probably would have been more clear if I didn't outright refuse to use the word 'Dongle'.

There's some hidden directories in there too, one containing files without extensions, so I thought it might be Windows Autorun causing problems, but I disabled that to no avail.

About the power issue though; could that affect USB pen drives too? The laptop wasn't plugged in at the time.

Thanks Nullw0rm ^^

[Alexander]

If I recall Windows 7 got smart and prevented autorun from doing anything automatically. The pen-drive is most likely faulty, in that it is not manufactured properly or the more new Windows drivers are messing up on it. It could be any number of reasons, some of mine quit working on my laptop long ago.

Personally I would reformat it to FAT32 and see if that works, it may not be able to mount it due to some filesystem error.