The trouble with microsoft is they think they know what is best for people.
I had an external maxtor 1tb USB drive that just stopped working after a windows (win7) update; it still worked fine when plugged into a linux server.
A quick google search… oh yeah, an awfull lot of windows7 users are complaining on many forums that external usb disk drives that used to be recognised when plugged in are no longer detected after a windows update (usb flash drives are all still automatically recognised just fine, only large external hard drives are no longer recognized; in by case seagate and maxtor drives affected, but the forums indicate any external disk drive that is not a usb flash drive is no longer automatically recognised even if it was recognised without probs six months ago).
The fix I found on the forums, a manual fix every time you want to attach the external usb disk.
Before deciding if this fix is for you, this issue is about Win7 always detecting the usb disk drive; it shows up under device manager perfectly, it is just not visible as a file system under windows file explorer (or visible to anything else other than device management tools).
So this fix only works if your win7 has detected the disk in the first place… oh, and you cannot fix it from any of the hardware profile screens either, they just say the disk is there and working perfectly; but it is not available as a filesystem for a user to use as a disk is all.
Control Panel, Administration tools (not device manage, admin tools), select storage management.
You will see all disks displayed including the external USB drive as devices, but wait, the usable devices have drive letters and the external USB disk drive does not… at some point microsoft released a patch that stopped automatic assignment of drive letters to external USB disk drives (whilst letting flash drives continue to assign drive letters automatically, go figure, maybe they changed it so only microsoft approved drives are automatically mounted like apple does with their approved hardware list ?).
Basically Win7 recognises the external USB disk drives just fine at the hardare level. At some point they made a choice to provide a windows update that prevents external USB drives from being automatically mounted… as noted above this USB drive used to be automatically mounted, that feature just stopped one day, and the google search you have just done to verify that claim shows 100’s of user found the same thing happened. But thats irrelevant, you want the fix…
From the storage management scren you have just navigated to you will have a list of all known disks. In my case on a toshiba laptop there were also a few hidden partitions showing up so you might have to guess the correct ‘disk’ to mount.
Anyway, the disk probably shows as available already, if not select the disk and right click and make it available.
On your available drive, right click and select the option to assign it a drive letter.
As soon as a drive letter is assigned it is available for use.
Yup, Windows7 is user friendly… as a training aid. I didn’t even know there was a “storage” maintenance option available until I had to google this out. I assume they disabled any sort of automount as a training aid for home users anyway.
Ok I’m not a windows fan. Probably because things like this happen.
These things happen on Linux as well (my preferred OS) but searches on linux issues generally throw up links to bug reports and fixes and I can be back up and running in minutes. All the search results I could find for this Win7 issue threw up unhelpfull links like not a microsoft issue, change usb power settings, update drivers… normal stuff for windows problems. The root cause is after one of the Win7 updates windows doesn’t assign drive letters to external USB disk drives anymore and they have to be manually set by users now.
I assume that will be fixed at some point in another windows update. Which will probably break something else.
Personal disclaimer on this post: I have windows (win7) running on a laptop, and four linux machines (2xserver and 2xdesktop) so I am biased against windows.
