Lost USB access after disk cleanup

[kir]

One morning I found that I had only 0 bytes
free on my C partition. The culprit seemed to be
a swollen winsxs folder. Searching for solutions on
the net I found a recommendation to use the
command dism /online /cleanup-image... to remove
unnecessary stuff. It worked OK, I gained 27 GB and
everything seemed to work normally.

But next day I was dismayed to find that my two 3 TB USB
external disks no longer are available. The disks appear
in Disk Management, the partition structure is visible but
there are no volumes or drive letters. If I try to assign
a drive letter I am told to rescan. No results. Diskpart
does not even show the partitions. When I plug in an USB
stick Disk Management does not recognize its
existence.

My Win7 computer is a dual-boot computer and all my USB
devices are recognized when I boot Win XP. So, the
problem must be the USB functionality in Win7. In
Event viewer I found warnings that it was not possible
to load the hotcom3.sys driver, but searching through
Device Manager I found no indication of missing
drivers.

System restore is not available (on dual-boot computers
XP destroys the saved images) but I could try activating an
old Acronis image of C:, which may bring back the
"0 bytes free" version.

Obviously I would prefer finding some way of just
restoring the USB functions. If it is possible?

 

[Ed Cryer]

One morning I found that I had only 0 bytes
free on my C partition. The culprit seemed to be
a swollen winsxs folder. Searching for solutions on
the net I found a recommendation to use the
command dism /online /cleanup-image... to remove
unnecessary stuff. It worked OK, I gained 27 GB and
everything seemed to work normally.

But next day I was dismayed to find that my two 3 TB USB
external disks no longer are available. The disks appear
in Disk Management, the partition structure is visible but
there are no volumes or drive letters. If I try to assign
a drive letter I am told to rescan. No results. Diskpart
does not even show the partitions. When I plug in an USB
stick Disk Management does not recognize its
existence.

My Win7 computer is a dual-boot computer and all my USB
devices are recognized when I boot Win XP. So, the
problem must be the USB functionality in Win7. In
Event viewer I found warnings that it was not possible
to load the hotcom3.sys driver, but searching through
Device Manager I found no indication of missing
drivers.

System restore is not available (on dual-boot computers
XP destroys the saved images) but I could try activating an
old Acronis image of C:, which may bring back the
"0 bytes free" version.

Obviously I would prefer finding some way of just
restoring the USB functions. If it is possible?

It looks as though DISM has altered the OS and caused the problem.
I've never known anyone use it just for clean-up, so I have no help there.
In your situation I'd opt for safety; restore from the old image and
remove files manually.
That might just be my lack of pioneer spirit, but I'd be asking myself
that if it's done this with USB3 what else has it done?

Your file "hotcom3.sys driver" failing to load might be a way into
rescuing the USB, but I can't find any reference to it on Google.
The nearest is this;
http://www.maxalbums.com/mp3/Hot+Com3.html

Ed

 

[Paul]

One morning I found that I had only 0 bytes
free on my C partition. The culprit seemed to be
a swollen winsxs folder. Searching for solutions on
the net I found a recommendation to use the
command dism /online /cleanup-image... to remove
unnecessary stuff. It worked OK, I gained 27 GB and
everything seemed to work normally.

But next day I was dismayed to find that my two 3 TB USB
external disks no longer are available. The disks appear
in Disk Management, the partition structure is visible but
there are no volumes or drive letters. If I try to assign
a drive letter I am told to rescan. No results. Diskpart
does not even show the partitions. When I plug in an USB
stick Disk Management does not recognize its
existence.

My Win7 computer is a dual-boot computer and all my USB
devices are recognized when I boot Win XP. So, the
problem must be the USB functionality in Win7. In
Event viewer I found warnings that it was not possible
to load the hotcom3.sys driver, but searching through
Device Manager I found no indication of missing
drivers.

System restore is not available (on dual-boot computers
XP destroys the saved images) but I could try activating an
old Acronis image of C:, which may bring back the
"0 bytes free" version.

Obviously I would prefer finding some way of just
restoring the USB functions. If it is possible?

Obviously.

Doesn't your situation "smell funny" to you ?

1) Oversized winsxs. That's not normally a "destination"
for excess stuff. Yes, it's a big folder. But hard links
from that folder, go into system folders, and there is only
one set of data clusters used. So the space in there, is
actually shared with other folders on the compute, and the
space is not a waste. Windows file explorer lacks the
refinements to point these things out to you, and prevent
you from panicking. (The file explorer "double counts" the
space used, when you look at individual folders, and you
as the user have to take extra precautions to not reach
the wrong conclusions about space usage. To check for saved
space, you have to look at info for the whole partition, to
prevent the double counting thing.)

That being said, the fact that winsxs shrank by a whole bunch,
hints that whatever was removed, may have been non-system
related. Or at least, not currently linked into any other
folder.

I thought if you clean up after SP1, the saving is around
500MB or so. Cleaning up after SP1, really shouldn't be
saving 10's of gigabytes.

2) System complains about "hotcom3", something I
can't find in an online search. Normally, just about
any system file you can think of, has come up in a
conversation somewhere. Now, I'd be searching that
drive, trying to find the file, do properties on it,
find out what company wrote it.

Doing a cleanup of winsxs, should not have disabled
anything USB related. It's hard to guess from this
distance, what's missing. Did you have to install
any drivers to use those USB 3TB drives ? Did you
GPT (GUID Partition Table) prepare them ? Or were
they MBR ? I wouldn't think USB level stuff would
do anything like that, and some other layer is
damaged or missing. (Like the software Seagate or
Western Digital provides, to make one oversized
physical disk, appear as several smaller virtual
disks, so MBR partitioning could be used on all
of them.) If it's not something like that, then
you've got a third unexplained symptom. And malware
is good for that sort of thing (unexplained symptoms).

Try a search for hotcom3 on your computer, and see
if you can find the folder with that stuff in it.
Perhaps you can figure out what spiffy software
you're using to access those disks...

Paul

 

[Dave-UK]

My Win7 computer is a dual-boot computer and all my USB
devices are recognized when I boot Win XP. So, the
problem must be the USB functionality in Win7. In
Event viewer I found warnings that it was not possible
to load the hotcom3.sys driver, but searching through
Device Manager I found no indication of missing
drivers.

Are you sure it isn't hotcore3.sys ?
Do you use Paragon software?
http://www.file.net/process/hotcore3.sys.html

 

[Ed Cryer]

.

Are you sure it isn't hotcore3.sys ?
Do you use Paragon software?
http://www.file.net/process/hotcore3.sys.html

I have Paragon, and that file is in my System32/ Drivers folder, 37KB.

Ed