WD Elements SE 1TB - requires reconnecting/reinstalling every the pc is booted

[Cytheria]

As the subject says, I'm currently having a strange problem with the 1TB WD Elements SE drive I have on my pc.

Up until about a month ago I had had no problems with the drive at all, and its rapidly become a vital peice of hardware allowing me to back up and reimage one of the pcs I have at home after a power surge left the main hard disk with more dodgy areas than all the back alleys and docks in any place you care to name.

A month ago I upgraded my pc with a new mobo, and after reinstalling windows, etc etc everything seemed fine, except the external drive no longer seems to want to boot with windows, which it had done previously with no problems, and continues to do on my other pcs.

Now instead it shows up in device manager as an unidentified usb device which cannot be accessed.  Disconnecting and reconnecting the drive resolves the problem straight away, or alternately using the windows troubleshooting tool achieves pretty much the same thing by disconnecting it and reinstalling it.  For the life of me, however, I can't figure out how to get the drive to boot with windows without having to disconnect/reconnect it either physically, or via software.

Asides from the obvious motherboard changes, I now plug the drive into a USB 3 port (the behaviour continues on USB 2 anyway, its just more convenient with all the cables for it to be on that port.)

System is fully patched and up to date, including mobo drivers, mobo firmware, os, gfx card, etc etc.

Im running Windows 7 Pro 64bit, 16gb Ram with an AMD 8120 proc

Obviously this is more a quality of life issue than a burning need to fix the disk or anything... but it is playing havoc with using it as my systems backup disk and mp3 storage

Any ideas much appreciated

[Wizer]

When the drive shows as unidentified.. Did you try to update the drivers?

Is the drive connected to the wall? 

[Cytheria]

The device is plugged in to the mains, and is displaying a power light as normal... it even sounds like its spinning up as the pc starts.

Updating the drivers seems to have the same effect as disconnecting and reconnecting it unfortunately,  it'll start the drive working without any further issues as long as the pc remains switched on, but the next time the pc reboots, the system has forgotten what the hard disk is and reports it as an unidentified device again.

[alang]

I'm having exactly the same problem with exactly the same drive as you.

My 1TB WD Elements Desktop Drive was working fine up until recently when it started not being recognized upon bootup of the pc. No hardware changes have been performed that could have caused the fault to appear, the only way i can get my drive to be recognised is to unplug it reconnect and then restart the pc, very annoying and as you mentioned playing havoc with backup!

Tried the Microsoft Fix-It and it reported drivers missing /unknown, so is the fault with Microsoft Update?

Has there been any solutions yet?

[Cytheria · Accepted solution]

Unsure as to what the exact issue was, but it seems to have been resolved by plugging the drive into a powered hub I recently picked up, doesnt matter which port the hub is plugged into, windows is able to detect the drive fine on boot.  I guess the new motherboard wasnt putting out enough power for the drive to start up correctly or something.

Posting my resolution here in the hopes that this is of some use for other sufferers of this issue.

[Joe_S]

USB powered drives are extremely sensitive on volatage. A lot of PC builders use barely adequet power supplies. Then add in aall of the devices that now use USB and phones, MP3 players, etc plugged into recharge and it's easy to have problems.

Joe

[Cytheria]

Thats the odd thing Joe, and I completely agree, a lot of people do use drastically underpowered, or poor quality psu's and then wonder why their systems act up.

In my case though, I always tend to err on the side of caution (especially after knackering a couple of hard disks because of a poor psu), and my system is currently using an 850w  80+ rated psu which should be more than adequate for what its powering.

From rooting around a lot though, it looks like the gigabyte board I'm currently using (GA-880GM-USB3 AMD 880G) does seem to have a few problems with running USB devices properly so I'm going to assume this is a related problem.