USB Drives Not Found for Backup

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I am having a problem with automated copy backups.  My backup software reports that the USB drive was not found.  But it is there…

Some environment information.  I have a Maingear Shift desktop PC running Windows 10.  Until this week running Windows 1803 fully updated.  Based on articles from AskWoody I decided to update to Windows 1809 this week which happened with no issues.

I have a Drobo 5N2 that is on my local network.  I have it broken into multiple shares.  To back it up I have 4 separate USB drives on a USpeed 7 port USB 3.0 hub.  I use Novalogic’s backup software that is scheduled to do “file copy” operations to copy new and updated files from the Drobo shares to the USB drives each night.  I have 4 separate schedules, one for each share.  Up until sometime last fall everything was working just fine.  Every night the file copy operations ran just fine with no hardware errors.

Then suddenly some of the copy operations would fail saying that the target backup drive could not be found.  Yet, if I just manually kick off the job again in the morning it would run just fine.  The problem only happens on two of the four USB drives.  Two of the drives backup just fine, but the problem goes back and forth between two of the USB backup drives.  The same two, and there is no pattern to which one fails on a given night.  Like I mentioned, just kicking off the copy job manually in the morning works just fine.

I purchased a new 7 port USB hub.  That was a disaster… Windows 10 found the drives, but then when you click on the drive icon in Explorer there were no sub-folders below the top level folders.  I returned this USB hub and bought a new one…. same problem.  I put back the older USpeed 7 port USB hub that I’ve been using for years and the missing sub-folder problem went away.  But I still find that I have to get up in the morning and manually kick off the copy file operation.

I read on the forums about going to the USB hubs “Power Management” and turning off the option to power off the hub for no activity.  That hasn’t solved the problem.

The USB drives are:

1) Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive –  This is one of the drives that had the “not found” problem.

2) WD My Passport Drive – This one never has the problem.

3) Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive – This is the other drive that has the “not found” problem.

4) Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive – This drive never has the “not found” problem.

I imagine that the recommendation would be to contact Novalogic’s tech support, however I personally don’t believe that the problem is with their software vs something going on in Windows 10.  When I manually schedule the same copy backup job in their software in the morning it runs everytime without error..

I am asking if there are any other suggestions for what I might try to mitigate my problem.

TIA,

Bob

 

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The only thing I noticed is there is no mention if the USB 3 Hub/s had their own power supply.  The HDDs should have their own supply.  The Hub uses one port on the computer and USB 3 does provide more power to a device than USB 2 but there’s still a limit on how much the computer provides to the ports.  I have 3 USB drives connected to my main computer, a WD 1TB on USB 2, a WD 2TB on USB 3 and a WD 4TB on USB 3, all plugged directly to the computer and have no problems with them but I don’t have any custom power savings settings for the ports.  And I have both a Self-powered USB 3 Hub and a Port-powered USB 3 Hub, mostly for a “just-in-case” situation.

Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"

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rpetruzz

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Hello,

The USpeed 7 port USB 3.0 hub does have it’s own separate power supply.  It is connected directly to a USB 3.0 port off the main board on my Maingear Shift desktop computer.  The problem occurs to the same two drives even when I move the drive’s connection to a different port on the hub.  Yet two of the drives consistently work fine.  The problem appears to be drive specific.  The drives always retain the same drive letter assignments.

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Does Windows assign the same drive letter to each drive consistently? sometimes my backup program fails when Windows randomly assigns a different letter to a drive.

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rpetruzz

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Vincenzo,

I solved this problem with the free utility USBDLM.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Vincenzo

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Thanks, RG. I set the backup program to recognize the serial number of the drive, so it seems to be good so far. I’ll keep your suggestion in mind though.

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Hello,

Thank you for that suggestion.
You can see my ultimate solution to the problem in a post I made below…

Edit: Please do not duplicate posts.
see Lounge Rules

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As mentioned by others, Windows remembers only one assigned driver letter for a given removable drive, and Windows will forget this assigned drive letter for the given drive if you attach a different drive which was also assigned the same drive letter. Assigned drive letters are saved in Windows, and not on the drive.

I use separate removable backup drives for each of my computers. In all cases, I assigned letter Z to each of the backup drives. Doing so makes life much simpler when using backup programs.

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rpetruzz

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Hello,

Thank you for that suggestion. However, drive letter assignment hasn’t been a problem for me. All of my attached drives have always retained their assigned drive letter.

You can see my ultimate solution to the problem in a post I made below…

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So after replying to the two suggestions above, I went back into Device Manager and double checked my Power Management settings for the USB Hubs.  Don’t cha know … I found some hub entries that still had Power Management enabled…  I’d swear I examined every entry in there one by one.  Empirically I was wrong.  Let’s see how things go the next couple of nights.

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Elly

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Last night’s backup still had the problem with the disk drive not found.

So I’ve said it’s not my Novalogic backup software, and I still think that, but when everything else is ruled out you must consider alternatives.  This morning I started reviewing my windows event logs.  I found entries for the start and finish of the copy jobs.  And in reviewing the time stamps I saw that the logs for the failing drive not found error was about the same time as the drive that worked.  Background …. I’ve set the 4 copy jobs to be one hour apart … 12 midnight, 1 am, 2 am and 3 am to prevent timing problems.   Or so I thought…. I went into the job scheduler and found that the jobs for the two drives that alternately come up “not found” are both scheduled for 1 am.  One should be 1 am and the other 2 am.  So I’ve fixed the schedule and we’ll see what happens going forward…

BIG FOREHEAD SLAP!!!!!  DUH!

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I killed power management for all USB hubs (USB2 and USB3) on all of my computers. USB3 can be problematic if power management is enabled since USB3 drivers usually are third party drivers. On top of that Windows often doesn’t “see” that your third party backup program is using the USB3 drive. Why? Because most backup programs have installed and use their own proprietary low level I/O drivers.

Finally, USB3 ports can be flaky — especially USB3 ports on the front side of a desktop computer case since frequently these USB3 ports do not have proper shielding. The only reliable USB3 ports in such a case are the ones on the back side of the case and which are built into the motherboard.

 

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rpetruzz

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Not the same issue but possibly related. On a remote machine I manage (Windows 8.1) they have 2 USB drives, a Seagate Expansion and a Seagate Backup Plus. When I reboot the machine, one or both of the drives will not show up. I have to remove ghosted devices and reboot sometimes 2 or 3 times or more to get the drives back. This never occurred when they had WD drives. Extremely frustrating and time consuming.

I have a couple Seagates here of the same type and I notice they are much slower to appear in Windows when connected than other drives.

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rpetruzz

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Thank you for your post. I wound up replacing all of my Seagate drives with Western Digital Elements 4 tb drives. Since then everything is working just fine. I hypothesize that there is something going on with how Seagate responds to the Windows 10 supplied USB drivers. You can see more in a post I made below…

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Well, so much for the job schedule being the source of my problem.  The 1st night after I fixed the schedule each copy job ran with no problem.  But last night one of the two troubled jobs failed with the usual error of “device not found”.

Scanning the System event log I find the following logged entries:

Volume N: (\Device\HarddiskVolume21) is healthy.  No action is needed.

and

Volume O: (\Device\HarddiskVolume23) is healthy.  No action is needed.

These entries relate to the two drives where the problem occurs.  These entries appear with some frequency in the System event log.  There are no entries for any of the other two drives attached to the USB hub.

I’ve searched the web for these entries and the only information I get is from some questions to Microsoft support where they suggest a 3rd party application is causing the problem and they recommend a “Clean Boot” to resolve the issue.  But I don’t get why.  Also, I have experienced the “beep boop” sound you get where a USB device is disconnected and then reconnects.  That was mentioned in some peoples posts.  But I don’t see why this would happen to two drives and not others on the same USB 7 port hub.

Really frustrating……..

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Well, when all else fails …..

I hypothesized that the problem might just be specific to the physical drive and the way it interacts with Windows 10.  The physical drive being just fine, the interface software/hardware/ROM (whatever) was not playing nice with the Windows 10 provided driver.

So I replaced all of my Seagate drives with Western Digital Elements 4 tb drives.  Last night was the 1st night that the implementation was in place.  This morning all backups had run fine and there were no entries in the Event Log relating to the device “healthy”.

I consider this problem solved, albeit at a $$$ cost.  I’m not disparaging Seagate drives, I’ve used them for years, but somewhere along the way I think Microsoft made changes that impacted the Seagate interface.  Or vice versa, Seagate made changes.  I’ll continue to use the replaced Seagate drives on an ad hoc basis.  Just not for nightly backups.  Oh well…

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cyberSAR

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