External USB Drives Not Recognised.

Hi@abrogard

Try this:

Download v1.6.4 of the " drivecleanup.zip - remove nonpresent drives from the registry" from Drive Tools for Windows. Drive Tools for Windows

Unzip it to a folder, say drivecleanup.

You will have two folders Win32 and x64 each containing DriveCleanup.exe for 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.

Remove all USB storage devices/Hubs/docks from your system (except your Keyboard and mouse) and reboot.

Right click on the DriveCleanup.exe and run as administrator. (Use the *.exe file appropriate for your bit version of Windows.)

After the clean up act, reboot.

( When you plug in your USB devices after this cleanup these will be installed afresh. What you have done is to remove all non-present devices, drive letters and registry entries associated with them and start with a clean slate. Hopefully that should resolve the problem.)

jumanji said:

Hi@abrogard

Try this:

Download v1.6.4 of the " drivecleanup.zip - remove nonpresent drives from the registry" from Drive Tools for Windows. Drive Tools for Windows

Unzip it to a folder, say drivecleanup.

You will have two folders Win32 and x64 each containing DriveCleanup.exe for 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.

Remove all USB storage devices/Hubs/docks from your system (except your Keyboard and mouse) and reboot.

Right click on the DriveCleanup.exe and run as administrator. (Use the *.exe file appropriate for your bit version of Windows.)

After the clean up act, reboot.

( When you plug in your USB devices after this cleanup these will be installed afresh. What you have done is to remove all non-present devices, drive letters and registry entries associated with them and start with a clean slate. Hopefully that should resolve the problem.)

Thanks for that. Very interesting site. Well I did the thing and it cleaned up many things. But plugging one of the USB drives in caused the beep, beep, beep again. Plugging the thumbdrive in again ( I took it out to do this thing ) and it went in fine and got ascribed the drive letter D: . Even though the last message from drivecleanup was that 'automount is disabled and new drives will not be assigned a drive letter'.

Enable or Disable Automount of New Disks and Drives in Windows

Automount is this:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ands/automount

Difficult to say. Whatever, if you routinely plugin and plugout innumerable USB storage devices, do this drive cleanup routinely once in a while to free up the drive letters which Windows " forgets" to release.

A true team effort... glad it worked out.

The odd thing is there was a recent thread where a user reported that every few months on some machines automount became disabled. This seems something a few experience- no obvious explanation. So.. beware- might happen again..