USB 2.0 Problem

[bioboy]

Hi,

I have a Pikaone Flycase TV, which is basically an external harddrive, which can play media files on my TV. A few weeks ago I began to get problems with it randomly disconnecting and reconnecting to my PC while in use. Then I occasionally had it not showing in windows explorer, which was solved by unplugging it and plugging back in again a couple of times.

Eventually I couldn't read anything on the drive as it had been corrupted somehow, so I had to reformat the drive using an executable file provided by pikaone.

Now I find that when I plug the drive in either through the 6-Port USB 2.0 hub I have or directly to the USB 2.0 card in the back I get the following message: "The USB mass storage device is a hi-speed usb device and will function at reduced speed when plugged into a non hi-speed port", also the drive is not detected. All the ports I'm using and the hub are USB 2.0.

The only way I can get the drive to be detected and work is to make sure it's plugged in and switched on before starting the PC, whereas it's supposed to be plug and play.

An additional problem is that using programs like winrar on the drive is unbelievably slow now compared to a few weeks ago.

Can anybody help me please?

Btw, I am using Windows XP with SP2 installed.

Regards,

Bill

 

[ski]

See if using a different known working USB cable helps.
If no luck, then try the unit on a different system. If no luck there, then the unit may be bad.

 

[wahnula]

Try resetting to device to factory defaults, getting as close as you can to day one. Avoid using hub...plug it right into the PC. That corruption you mention is the bane of USB drives, not stopping the device with Window's "Safely remove Hardware" icon. You might have MBR corruption.

If there's any way to start from scratch I would recommend it.

When you reforfatted, did you add all the drivers to the device? If it's new enougj I would DBAN (

http://dban.sourceforge.net)

the drive and RMA it, start from scratch.
Tony

 

[bioboy]

Thanks for the help. Tried different cable, but no joy. The device was reset to factory settings when reformatted by the executable I downloaded.

Yesterday the PC wouldn't boot at all with the hub plugged in to the USB 2.0 port. I kept getting a blue screen saying that windows had prevented the PC starting to protect the PC (something about a possible power problem). I could plug the hub in once the PC had booted without crashing it, but the drive was still playing up.

This morning I plugged the hub into a USB 1.1 port on the PC and it's working fine now.........very strange. I suppose any transfers between the drive will be very slow, but I'm surprised I'm not getting any warnings about the drive being able to work faster in a USB 2.0 port anymore. Anymore ideas?

 

[bioboy]

Okay, so now I'm getting cyclic redundancy errors when trying to burn anything on the drive. I took a DVD which I know to be fine and created an image on the drive and it failed too. I then created an image of the same DVD on another drive and it burned fine. Does this sound like the drive is buggered?