Can someone help me correctly reinstall a Fideco USB external HDD dock

Jasong222 · 12 Mar 2021

Hey all,

I have an external 2 drive bay dock that worked fine until recently but now when plugged in appears as an unknown device or as a card reader, and this has effected it's performance.

Brief summary- Couple months ago I bought an external USB dock. Multiple usb ports, support for two monitors, it's a Plugable extension dock. That dock started crashing on me. Often enough that it caused errors on several external drives I have. With the help of the fine folks here at TenForums, and with Plugable's amazing support (really amazing, highly recommend them on that basis alone), I was able to get just about everything fixed. (Ultimately, updating the BIOS was the solution, which was very weird for me). Anyway. I'm set except for this one final thing.

Ok. So I have a Fideco external 2 disk hdd drive dock. It's this one: Amazon.com

I've had the dock for a couple years, and it generally works fine. It's slow to spin up sometimes, but that's not unusual I think. Once it's spun up (spinned up?) it works fine. Until I started having my recent problems.

I forget how it showed up in my 'safely remove hardware' text box previously, but now it shows up as one of either two things-

Unknown device (set address failed) or
<something something> card reader

Can someone help me correctly reinstall a Fideco USB external HDD dock-set-address-failed.png

I don't have a picture of the 'card reader' window. For a while it was unknown device but I was playing around with trying to fix it and then it was card reader and now for some reason it's Unknown Device again.

And the drives no longer work well. Opening the root directly is ok, but opening one of the root folders takes forever to spin up. Something like 1.5-2 minutes. I timed it once. Then, opening up folder further also takes a long time. The drive has video files on it. Files take a long time to load up and stutter and crash often.

To check, I have a single drive bay/external drive dock that I don't use any more and I hooked that up with one of the hard drives. Works exactly as it should.

So I need to somehow successfully get windows to see this device accurately. I've tried 'removing device' from "Devices and Printers" and I've tried uninstalling drivers from Device Manager (USB controllers and Disk drives). I'm either choosing the wrong stuff to uninstall or it's reinstalling incorrectly.

I'm very certain there was no specific driver from the manufacturer. I've reached out to them to ask how to properly uninstall/reinstall but I have not heard back. They are in China and the website doesn't really look like they offer much customer support.

This should be a reasonably simple thing to do, yet the stuff I've tried hasn't worked. Any help?

Windows 10 Home 20H2 (Build 19042.867). Windows is not currently pinging me to update anything.

Thanks!

Megahertz · 12 Mar 2021

Normally this kind of hardware is plug and play.
Did the Fideco USB external HDD dock required any driver?
Did it came with a CD / DVD disk?

Jasong222 · 12 Mar 2021

Megahertz said:

Normally this kind of hardware is plug and play.

?

Hi, thanks for the response!

I know, they usually just work, right? That's why this has me frustrated.

As far as I can recall, there was no drivers to install. I usually keep physical disks, and I don't have any. And the Fideco site has no support pages or driver download pages to speak of.

Hard Drive Docking Station, FIDECO USB 3.0 HDD Docking Station Dual-Bay External Hard Drive Docking - FIDECO Technology Development Company ltd

FIDECO Technology Development Company ltd

The dock has 2 drive bays, 2 usb ports, and slots for SD cards. Somehow it seems that when the connection got corrupted it defaulted not to the drive bays, but to the card reader? I notice in device manager there are 3 or 4 different driver-devices that pop up when I plug it in. They're labelled mostly the same. Maybe I need to uninstall a specific one? Or... All of them (meaning like, every single generic usb device driver) and let Windows reinstall them all again? I'm a little hesitant to do that unless someone suggests it and can walk me through it.

Can someone help me correctly reinstall a Fideco USB external HDD dock-device-manager.png

jumanji · 13 Mar 2021

I presume it is a hardware failure. To confirm try the dock on another computer. If it behaves the sameway, yes it is - confirmed.

Megahertz · 13 Mar 2021

You didn't answer may questions:
Did the Fideco USB external HDD dock required any driver? Did it came with a CD / DVD disk?

If it doesn't require any software, there is nothing you can do. It's probably a hardware issue.

Berton · 13 Mar 2021

I use a couple of similar docks and no drivers were required for Windows 10 and Linux Mint 20 [separate computers not VMs], just had to plug them into the correct type USB port, either USB 2 or USB 3. They do not show in File Explorer until a drive is inserted.

Jasong222 · 15 Mar 2021

jumanji said:

I presume it is a hardware failure. To confirm try the dock on another computer. If it behaves the sameway, yes it is - confirmed.

Hey, apologies for the delayed response, I was layed out for a couple days. Back now.

Great suggestion, I wonder why I keep forgetting about that troubleshooting 101 step, lol. I have a had time believing it's a hardware failure, unless the issue with the Plugable 2 monitor dock can cause physical issues.

(Real quick- the problem with the dock was that, very frequently, the video signal would drop and reset- the video would go out, transfer back to the laptop screen, and then, usually, reset and video would go back to the two monitors plugged into the dock. I would get the USB unplugged and replugged in sounds. Most of the time, disk activity would continue normally. But at the same time, I started to get disk errors. Security ID errors, loss of partition, loss of drive letters. That all required me to copy data off those drives, reformat, and recover data in one case. The solution was to update the BIOS. Once I did that then there were no more problems. So far.

Ok, so I plugged it into another laptop (a Dell Inspiron). The dock shows up as a 3.0 card reader. I'm fairly certain that the dock has showed up correctly there in the past, as "Generic USB device" or something like that. Something not so obviously incorrect as a Card Reader. But here we are. And I'll also note that the dock worked without the delays that I experienced on my main laptop. It seemed to work fine as it usually does.

Can someone help me correctly reinstall a Fideco USB external HDD dock-shows-dell-card-reader.png

I'm at a loss. I guess then if I still experience problems with functionality (slow access times, etc.) you're conclusion is that it's a physical problem with the dock. Is that correct?

- - - Updated - - -

Megahertz said:

You didn't answer may questions:
Did the Fideco USB external HDD dock required any driver? Did it came with a CD / DVD disk?

If it doesn't require any software, there is nothing you can do. It's probably a hardware issue.

Hey, apologies for the delay, I was out for a couple days. And more apologies, I thought I did answer your question:

As far as I can recall, there was no drivers to install. I usually keep physical disks, and I don't have any. And the Fideco site has no support pages or driver download pages to speak of.

I can put it more directly- No drivers, no disk. I plugged it in and Windows just installed it itself.

One suggestion from somewhere would be to uninstall all the USB drivers on the laptop. Removing all the good with any of the bad. But then windows would just reinstall them again, which should be fine.

Would you not think that's something to try?

- - - Updated - - -

Berton said:

I use a couple of similar docks and no drivers were required for Windows 10 and Linux Mint 20 [separate computers not VMs], just had to plug them into the correct type USB port, either USB 2 or USB 3. They do not show in File Explorer until a drive is inserted.

Apologies for the delayed response.

Yeah, that's my experience as well. What do you think about the idea of uninstalling all the drivers (or trying to figure out which ones are specifically tied to this dock), and having windows try to reinstall them?

I did plug the dock into another laptop. It showed as "3.0 Card Reader". Still not what I remember it showing originally, but also not what it shows on my main laptop currently- "Set address failed". It also seems to function better on that computer. I don't have the long load times, and a couple videos I played played correctly and without error or delay. Pics are in another message above, ITT.

Berton · 16 Mar 2021

I actually have 3 of the docks, 2 BlackX and 1 EaXer. 1 is on my workbench, 1 attached to my Linux Mint computer and the EaXer on my Win10 Pro Desktop, no software was required. If a drive is inserted it just takes the next drive letter available to Disk Management and File Explorer. I've used at least 1 [an older single-bay model] back to WinXP days.

Jasong222 · 17 Mar 2021

Berton said:

I actually have 3 of the docks, 2 BlackX and 1 EaXer. 1 is on my workbench, 1 attached to my Linux Mint computer and the EaXer on my Win10 Pro Desktop, no software was required. If a drive is inserted it just takes the next drive letter available to Disk Management and File Explorer. I've used at least 1 [an older single-bay model] back to WinXP days.

Good to know, thanks