Is there a specific Win component that manages a USB port?

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My flash drive normally flashes just on occasions. After I had accidently typed a wrong Web address and got 2 redirects before I could kill the ethernet, my flash drive starting blinking constantly. It does this on both USB ports with 2 different USBs, both of which act normally on another PC, both Win 10 home. I had also done a full format of a new flash drive and interrupted that because taking hours, so maybe that was the culprit.

After the possible corruption both my antivirus and MalwareBytes found no virus. I ran the Windows Malware Removal tool, and in the file count up front it said one infection was found but at the end report it listed no infections and no other information.

Since I had done a create restore point before the October Tuesday update, I restored to back to the September update and that restore reinstalled both Sept and Oct updates with no change to the blinking light. If I click Eject but without pulling the flash out the blinking stops.

So I am wondering if there is a specific Win file that process USB access and maybe that is corrupted. If so is there a way to reinstall just that one file? Thanks.

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Windows may be attempting to index your USB – it is just a disk drive.

You can use the Sysinternals ProcessMonitor utility to see if any files are open on the USB.

cheers, Paul

1 user thanked author for this post.

J9438

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Paul T wrote:

cheers, Paul

Thanks again Paul. You always are there to help when frustrating problems arise. You and the rest of the AskWoody people, Susan, b, PK Cano, Alex are all so GREAT! With new posts appearing every few minutes 24/7 I don’t know how you have time to answer so many questions.

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Paul T wrote:

You can use the Sysinternals ProcessMonitor utility

Before I used that I suddenly was thinking about what I mentioned earlier

J9438 wrote:

I had also done a full format of a new flash drive and interrupted that because taking hours, so maybe that was the culprit.

So just as a hunch I decided to run the full format again, but without cancelling mid stream. It took several hours but at the end I took out the new flash and inserted the old one that was blinking constantly. Guess what? No more blinking. So my guess is that interrupting the full format left Win thinking it was still running but with never an end of file hit to clear the process.

After that I ran the monitor you gave me. I was not sure how to interpret it but in the long list of events I did not see anything that seemed to reference an I/O on a disk drive as I just had the PC sitting idle.

So I think another weird thing is now solved!!!

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Well the flash drive started blinking continuously again and also just on 1 of 2 PCs. I decided to look again for a solution and I see above:

Paul T wrote:

Windows may be attempting to index your USB – it is just a disk drive.

so I looked into indexing – no luck, but in looking at that process I noticed my antivirus has the ability to scan just a specific drive, which I had not done before.

So I scanned the blinking drive and at the scan end the blinking mysteriously stopped even though the antivirus found no threats. Nothing else I had tried would stop the infinite blinking. Since a flashing light generally means the drive is being written to or read from perhaps the anti virus at the end of scan issues a stop read/write command??? (Which normally should occur at the end of every read/write but apparently some event did not do such??)

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I just had a similar issue with a client’s machine. Couldn’t eject backup drive without a reboot. Indexing & A/V were set to not scan drive. Turned out it was his new QuickBooks Company File Monitoring Service. Changed the service from automatic to automatic (delayed start) and haven’t had the issue for a week now. What a pain!

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J9438

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