New thought on stubborn Win10 USB problems

After months of problems with external USB drives not mounting and not being able to use my card readers, either internal or external, I took my rig in to a shop. They gave me the usual okey doke about missing a driver.

Well, they fixed the external drive mounting issue: they said that 'diskpart' or something like that had somehow been disabled. The enabled it and that problem was solved.

The card reader prob has not been solved. They worked on it for two days straight. Their conclusion is that part of Win10 is simply broken and can't be fixed. Their experience mirrored mine: I would uninstall the drivers for the USB controllers in Device Manager and update them with newer drivers. The card reader worked for one session, then, on reboot, reverted to not being accessible.

What they discovered was that even though I had installed newer drivers, Windows, on a restart would uninstall the new drivers and reinstall the old, broken drivers so that my card readers would never be accessible. They insist that they have about 3-4 systems a week come in that have some sort of insoluble Win10 issue; however, they hadn't seen my exact situation. They had a similar scenario where a sound card crashed the rig any time they used it.

They were also not hopeful that any Win10 fix would appear in any foreseeable update.

They offered to reinstall Win7 to factory defaults if I wanted. Being a photographer and needing a card reader this is tempting. But I would then lose my 'free upgrade' in case they ever do fix Win10. Dilemma.

Does anyone know if this is true about MS and if there are updates that may solve this situation. Or should I go back to Win7? Or any other information or suggestions. Thank you.

Reba

card readers model would help quite some in this issue

Thanks for asking for clarification. Internal is Rosewill multi-card device. External is Lexar dual slot 3.0. The Lexar has been tested with several other computers and works on them.

I'm not as concerned with the internal as with the external. I use CF cards mostly and the internal one has bent pins so I was using the external before the upgrade to Win10. Now I use a USB 3.0 cable to transfer directly from the the camera.

Microsoft issued a tool to block a specific driver from reinstalling - might be worth a try.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3073930

You don't lose your upgrade rights if you go back to Win 7. If you upgraded to 10 and it was successfully activated, your machine is registered and you have "digital rights" to 10 on that machine. It will be activated again automatically if you later reinstall it.

OldMike65 said:

I just took my memory card out of my camera, and placed it in one of my card reader slots and Windows 10 Pro immediately installed a driver for it, and I can view anything on the card, no problem. So it does work fine for me, running Windows 10 Pro with all the latest updates installed. :)

I have all the current updates on Win 10 home. I cannot tell you how many times I have tried this with no result. I uninstalled and let Win10 reinstall each and every USB driver on the system. I have run Windows Hardware Troubleshooter and it has worked just for that session. On startup or reboot the next time the card readers are not accessible. I have searched for, downloaded, and installed other drivers to no avail. Device Manager keeps saying that I have the latest driver, but the card reader will not work with this system: mobo is Asus P6X58D-E, an older board, but it still passed the Win10 hardware compatibility check. I have tried the card reader on other systems with no problem. There is something about the driver. After several weeks of trying to work on this without success I took it to a shop. The computer shop's experience mirrored my own. It appears that on each reboot Win10 installs the driver that doesn't work. And at this point I don't know what driver will work. I am at wit's end.

I have windows 10 pre-loaded to my computer, I updated my computer yesterday to Windows 10 Version 1607 (Anniversary Update). it update no problem. well I tried plugging my usb WD my passport into my computer and now its not showing up at all. I've clicked on the folder to show hidden folders and that was a no go. I also went under device manger too see if it was not up to date, and it was up to date. would I have to go to the Western digital website to find the driver and load it back on there. I have attached files to my post. an I also cant go back on the driver at all as well. is it something with Windows 10 Version 1607 (Anniversary Update)

You're singing my song. That happened to my USB drives also. When I gave up and took it into the shop they found that function called 'diskpart' that needs to be enabled to recognize the external USB drives had somehow been disabled. Once it was enabled again the USB drives were again recognized and accessible. The other part of my problem, the card readers, is seemingly intractable owing to Windows continuously updating on reboot.

I am going to explore David Y's suggestion once I get my computer home from the shop.

do you remember the steps that you had to take to fix it?