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USB External Hard Drive Problem, This device cannot start. (Code 10)

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4 replies

by reeflion

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I have a toshiba satellite p105 lapltop running windows vista home premium, i have been using a 40 gb Segate USB External Hard Drive to transfer information between my computers!
The other day someone accidentally unpluged the usb cable while the autorun of the drive was runing (the drive was in use, the blue light was flasing when it was unpluged), and pluged back again, but the drive did not respon anymore.
I restarted my laptop and pluged again the hard drive, but it started making lots of noise, and never opened any folder! But it was still visible in my pc as a generic hard drive (not as MUUU,the name i gave to it), so i tried to format it, but it happened again, it kept thinking for about 2 hours and never did anthing, so i let it go.
I waited for about a day or two to plug it again, and now this is what happened:
When i plug the usb cable the tray icon appears, and fo a minute or two i can see the USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE in the box (when you doble click on the usb tray icon), the device in the box disapears, but the tray icon is still in my desktop (but when i double click the box is empty).
When i go to device manager i can see the USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE in the Universal Serial Bus Controller, but it appears with a yellow eclamation, when i double click on it the following message appears "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". And tere is no other disk drive in view than the laptop hard drive.
Also when i go to my computer i dont see another drive than my defalt "C" and the cd/dvd drive.
I dont care about the information in the drive, all i want to do is to be able to use it again, so if anyone can help me on how to reset o reformat this drive y will apreciate it very much!

4 replies

by hal 9000

What happens when any HDD is running and power is removed is that the heads crash against the platters and do damage. What it sounds as if has happened here is that the heads have been destroyed and are now incapable of reading the platters.

You can change the HDD over to a replacement one and be up and running again with only needing to perform a Format on the new HDD after it is fitted to the external Caddy.

[b]NEVER ALLOW one of these drives to be unplugged while in use as they are easily destroyed and expensive to recover data from if necessary.[/b]

Col

by vadivel.murughan

Would surely go with Hal or the other user as Never unplug any Ext Drives when in use surely goes for a toss.

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