I have been having trouble for a while now I have a ATA usb 3.0 usb drive
Here is the issue. When I plug the usb drive into my usb port on my dell computer the light comes on the drive. The light flashes when I click on the icon under this pc the usb drive is drive d. When I click on the icon I just get a blue circle that goes around and around in a circle. I did put some pictures on this drive and some documents on it as well. Now the pictures and the documents are completely gone and all that their is now is just a blank white window.
The other thing that is weird is that when I exit the usb window I also get an error message as follows:
d:/ Is not accessible.
The parameter is incorrect.
What does this error mean.
my usb port works just fine I have some usb sticks and they work just fine when I plug them into my usb port on my laptop.
I have some screenshots:
I do not feel comfortable messing with the registry
I have windows 11 home
64 bit operating system
I also install all the preview updates and all the commutive updates through windows update.
Please feel free to give a lengthy explanation and instructions if this issue can be fixed.
Thanks
I appreciate your thoughts and help Mikah
You can also email me with your instructions as well. My email address is:
Probably not, unfortunately. SpinRite is not for the casual user, requiring to be booted into DOS (and most modern machines don’t even have legacy boot anyway more.) It also relies on the BIOS for its USB support, and that can be iffy, because there were some serious bugs in the code when USB 2 was added to the BIOS, related to the size boundary around 130G or so. It COULD probably be made to work in the circumstance, but if the problem is USB related (as in there is something funky with the hardware inside the USB stick) then it may not work right under DOS any more than it does under Windows, and if DOS can’t see it, SpinRite won’t work with it.
So if I am correct do you have to have an empty usb stick in order to save spin Rite on. Also does Spin Rite cost money to use it. I can only use free no charge programs. I do not now how to use spin Rite.
It costs around $70, I think. I have used it for over a decade. My predecessor had set up a NAS with RAID 0, instead of RAID 5! When one of the drives died, we slapped it into a USB-SATA adapter on a PC and booted into SpinRite and let it do its thing. The next day, the drive was accessible and we put it back in the NAS and it worked, We immediately copied all the data off the NAS to a temporary location, replaced the drive we had repaired and rebuilt the NAS using RAID 5 and copied the data back onto it.
We used a standard Dell Optiplex mini PC and a $10 USB-SATA adapter off of Amazon. It just worked.
@PHolder says that some modern motherboards can be a bit iffy with their USB implementations, but I’ve never had any problems, but I’ve always had standard business PCs, not high-end gaming PCs, for example.
Yes, it requires a blank USB-Stick (or a CR-R, if you have a CD/DVD/BR drive in your PC). It can be an old USB 2 stick with 1GB, if it comes to it, the program + DOS doesn’t even use 1MB of space. I used Rufus to create a bootable USB stick.
For me, it would depend on what is on the USB drive, if the contents isn’t worth the price of a copy of SpinRite, I’d just reformat it, or throw it away and get a new one. If the data on the drive is worth a lot of money, or is family memories etc., the cost of the SpinRite is a negligible cost.
Actually it goes a bit both ways. Assuming the device can do legacy booting, it’s not THAT modern But older ones can cause corruption ( The 128Gib/137GB USB BIOS bug! – Easy2Boot ) and newer ones may only recognize the boot USB device (with SpinRite on it) and be difficult (or near impossible) to get the drive you wish to exercise to also be visible.
What are your computer specs? Can your motherboard support the full power draw required for this drive? If not, does plugging into a powered docking station help?
Also - do you have OneDrive sync and/or libraries running? I’ve run into trouble when someone uses an external drive for OneDrive files but then uninstalls OneDrive from the machine.
I don’t think the OP of this thread is technical enough for these recommendations guys. Maybe I’m wrong, but look at his post history and judge for yourself.
Jeff’s advice is likely the best for the OP. Send it to a professional is likely the simplest solution.
But older ones can cause corruption (