Windows 7: USB Drive Phantom Problem

[Gene Wirchenko]

Hello:

I have a USB drive that I use for transferring data from system
to system. Occasionally, when I mount it on my Windows 7 system,
Windows claims that there is a problem with the drive and wants to
scan it. It never finds anything wrong, I have never detected any
data loss. When this happens, it tends to happen a number of
consecutive times.

I am very careful to Safely Remove Hardware before unmounting the
drive from any system so that is not it.

Any ideas what is going on and what I can do about this?

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

 

[Wolf K]

Hello:

I have a USB drive that I use for transferring data from system
to system. Occasionally, when I mount it on my Windows 7 system,
Windows claims that there is a problem with the drive and wants to
scan it. It never finds anything wrong, I have never detected any
data loss. When this happens, it tends to happen a number of
consecutive times.

I am very careful to Safely Remove Hardware before unmounting the
drive from any system so that is not it.

Any ideas what is going on and what I can do about this?

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Do you plug into the same port every time, or occasionally in a
different port? If the latter, then you may be confusing Windows in some
way. Or so I surmise, since my list of drives includes "M: Removable
Media", an external optical drive that is switched on. It looks to me
like W7 creates a placeholder for a USB device the first time you
connect it.

HTH
Wolf K.

 

[Wolf K]

Do you plug into the same port every time, or occasionally in a
different port? If the latter, then you may be confusing Windows in some
way. Or so I surmise, since my list of drives includes "M: Removable
Media", an external optical drive that is switched on. It looks to me
like W7 creates a placeholder for a USB device the first time you
connect it.

HTH
Wolf K.

Sorry, that should read "..is NOT switched on". Selective inattention,
aka "We red what we intended, not what we typed."

HTH
Wolf K.

 

[Gene Wirchenko]

Usually the same port. I can not say "always", but it is close.
(My Windows 7 box has two USB ports, and it is easier to reach the
left one.) I am pretty sure that it has always been the left port
recently.

I do not know about that as my USB use is simple: memory stick
only. The same drive letter gets assigned each time.

Sorry, that should read "..is NOT switched on". Selective inattention,
aka "We red what we intended, not what we typed."

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

 

[BeeJ]

Same thing happens here.

My Corsair Flash Voyager is formatted FAT32.
I plug it into several XP Pro laptops with no problems but plugging
into Windows 7 Pro the same message comes up.

I did allow Windows 7 to "process" it and then removed it and plugged
it in again and I got the same message requesting a scan.
Windows 7 does not even know what it just did.
I always plug the USB flash into the same USB port.
My Windows 7 has all the latest service packs and updates.

After Win 7 scan processing, I plugged back into an XP Pro machine and
got no messages there and everything was fine.
Back to Windows 7 and the message came up again.

Maybe because the flash drive was formatted FAT32 and not NTFS ???
Some flash drives don't allow NTFS formatting.

Anyway I now ignore the message and just cancel it.

BTW I never use the "Safely Remove Hardware" and never have had a
problem. This ever since flash drives became available.

 

[Rob]

Same thing happens here.

My Corsair Flash Voyager is formatted FAT32.
I plug it into several XP Pro laptops with no problems but plugging into
Windows 7 Pro the same message comes up.

I did allow Windows 7 to "process" it and then removed it and plugged it
in again and I got the same message requesting a scan.
Windows 7 does not even know what it just did.
I always plug the USB flash into the same USB port.
My Windows 7 has all the latest service packs and updates.

After Win 7 scan processing, I plugged back into an XP Pro machine and
got no messages there and everything was fine.
Back to Windows 7 and the message came up again.

Maybe because the flash drive was formatted FAT32 and not NTFS ???
Some flash drives don't allow NTFS formatting.

Anyway I now ignore the message and just cancel it.

BTW I never use the "Safely Remove Hardware" and never have had a
problem. This ever since flash drives became available.

haven't found a drive that will format ntfs

 

[Rob]

Hello:

I have a USB drive that I use for transferring data from system
to system. Occasionally, when I mount it on my Windows 7 system,
Windows claims that there is a problem with the drive and wants to
scan it. It never finds anything wrong, I have never detected any
data loss. When this happens, it tends to happen a number of
consecutive times.

I am very careful to Safely Remove Hardware before unmounting the
drive from any system so that is not it.

Any ideas what is going on and what I can do about this?

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Have a look at the MS fixit solutions there is one that covers this and
its a simple fix.

 

[Paul]

haven't found a drive that will format ntfs

There are ways to do that.

Once prepared, Windows is happy to work with it (NTFS USB key).

As long as the USB key has a single partition that is.
Windows refuses to mount multiple partitions on a USB key,
although you can put them on there with a Linux LiveCD. It
just mounts the first one it finds, and ignores the rest.

Right now, I have a single 1GB FAT16 partition on my 8GB USB
key, and that was put there by Linux too. Because Windows tools
refused to do that (like, the HP Formatter would bomb out if
asked to do that). If you need to prepare test cases, to see
how tolerant Windows is, then Linux is your friend. Between
fdisk and mkfs family, you can have a lot of fun.

If I needed to put a single 1GB FAT16 partition on the 8GB flash,
the trick to doing that, is to loopback mount a 1GB file, then
format with mkfs, unmount the loopback mount, then "dd" transfer
the 1GB image to the flash stick. So you can either create USB
flash with an MBR and primary partition table, or create
flash with just a single file system on it. You'd be amazed
how many stupid things you can do with them, many of which
won't work for one reason or another. (I was trying a whole
bunch of bootable media type experiments, which is why I was
trying these things out.)

Paul

 

[Paul]

Hello:

I have a USB drive that I use for transferring data from system
to system. Occasionally, when I mount it on my Windows 7 system,
Windows claims that there is a problem with the drive and wants to
scan it. It never finds anything wrong, I have never detected any
data loss. When this happens, it tends to happen a number of
consecutive times.

I am very careful to Safely Remove Hardware before unmounting the
drive from any system so that is not it.

Any ideas what is going on and what I can do about this?

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

I started here.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/44941350-fd71-4a18-8b3f-f8882d4946ea/

And the last post in that thread, points here.

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...le-scan-fix-removable-drive-notification.html

"Oh, after many hours of investigating this annoyance,
I found out how to stop the "Do you want to scan and fix"
problem. Simply goto

Start
type msconfig
Services Tab
Scroll down and Un check Shell Hardware Detection
Restart Windows
Done."

I hope such a change, doesn't have side effects... Like preventing
other corruptions from being detected.

Paul

 

[Stan Brown]

Hello:

I have a USB drive that I use for transferring data from system
to system. Occasionally, when I mount it on my Windows 7 system,
Windows claims that there is a problem with the drive and wants to
scan it. It never finds anything wrong, I have never detected any
data loss. When this happens, it tends to happen a number of
consecutive times.

I am very careful to Safely Remove Hardware before unmounting the
drive from any system so that is not it.

Any ideas what is going on and what I can do about this?

It's actually a pretty common annoyance. See here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/35622/disable-scan-and-fix-for-
removable-drives-in-windows/

I haven't followed the advice to disable the warning because I
suspect, from the name of the service, that it may disable not just
Autoplay but Windows' detection of devices when I plug them in. I
haven't been motivated enough to test that suspicion.

 

[BillW50]

In

Right now, I have a single 1GB FAT16 partition on my 8GB USB
key, and that was put there by Linux too. Because Windows tools
refused to do that (like, the HP Formatter would bomb out if
asked to do that). If you need to prepare test cases, to see
how tolerant Windows is, then Linux is your friend. Between
fdisk and mkfs family, you can have a lot of fun.

I bought a fake 8GB flash drive on eBay which turned out to be really a
2GB. I didn't know how to fix it, since anything past 2GB would be lost
if saved there. I decided to partition it and just not use the last 6GB.
And a Windows partitioning tool (EaseUS) will create multiple partitions
on a flash drive under Windows. No Linux is necessary. And this fake
flash drive has been working fine for years this way. ;-)

 

[BeeJ]

OK so how do I format to NTFS if when I click format and it only shows
FAT options?

 

[BeeJ]

What ways? Format shows only FAT formatting.

 

[Shamen]

OK so how do I format to NTFS if when I click format and it only shows
FAT options?

Win7 Ultimate
When I right click on format for USB I have 3 choices:

NTFS
FAT32 (Default)
exFAT

 

[Shamen]

Win7 Ultimate
When I right click on format for USB I have 3 choices:

NTFS
FAT32 (Default)
exFAT

Correction, not right click just click then click down arrow on file system.

 

[BillW50]

In

In

I bought a fake 8GB flash drive on eBay which turned out to be really
a 2GB. I didn't know how to fix it, since anything past 2GB would be
lost if saved there. I decided to partition it and just not use the
last 6GB. And a Windows partitioning tool (EaseUS) will create
multiple partitions on a flash drive under Windows. No Linux is
necessary. And this fake flash drive has been working fine for years
this way. ;-)

I just double checked and I guess it wasn't EASEUS Partition Manager
that allows this. It was one of my partition managers that let you do
it. I tried:

EASEUS Partition Manager v1.6.4
EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.0 Home Edition

Two that let me partition a flash drive were:

Paragon Partition Manager 2009
Partition Magic v8

 

[Paul]

What ways? Format shows only FAT formatting.

I can format them in Linux that way.

I think I can also do it in another Windows OS, just not
my current WinXP.

It's damn annoying to not have them in the proper
Windows format tool. And hacking Windows to make it
work, doesn't count

Paul

 

[Paul]

OK so how do I format to NTFS if when I click format and it only shows
FAT options?

See the table here.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html

Uwe recommends formatting FAT32 (a quick format will do, and wear
the stick a bit less). Then, use the "convert" command from the
command line. Apparently the WinXP "convert" does a decent cluster
size, whereas earlier ones don't. So I'm guessing the Windows 7
one should be OK as well.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html#ntfs_format

convert z: /fs:ntfs

HTH,
Paul

 

[BillW50]

In

haven't found a drive that will format ntfs

What tools have to tried? This list is far from complete, but just a
small example of ones that will allow you to format in NTFS.

EASEUS Partition Manager v1.6.4 (free)
EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.0 Home Edition (free)
Partition Magic v8 (commercial)
Paragon Partition Manager 2009 (both in free and commercial versions)

The last two will let you make multiple partitions on a flash drive too.

 

[BillW50]

In

See the table here.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html

I wouldn't bother with the Hitachi Microdrive filter driver this article
talks about. I tried this a few years back and it takes a huge hit on
I/O performance. There are far better ways around this problem and far
less work.