Hardware & Devices Discussion Boards

So lately I'm having a weird problem with my USB ports. I'll try to explain.

I keep hearing that sound like someone's putting in a flash drive & removing it. Over & over & over. Also, when I look in Windows Explorer, I see a number of "Removable Drives". They must be some kind of virtual drive because I certainly don't have that many pysical drives. They were there when I bought the PC.

At any rate, this problem isn't happening all the time. It just randomly starts. When it's happening, the list of drives in Windows Explorer disappears and reappears at a fast rate in sync with the sound I described.

This is a fairly new PC, and I use AVG and Malware Bytes and scan regularly.

I have a wireless keyboard & mouse, a wireless headset, a printer, and 2 monitors plugged into the USB ports.

I have no clue how to figure out what's wrong. Any hardware people wanna point me in the right direction.

If it's not broken, fix it until it is

I'm not a hardware-person, but.. if you open the "properties" screen of "my computer", go to "Advanced settings", then to the "Hardware" tab and press the button "Device manager" (or somthing similar, using a silly localized/non English version of Windows atm), you'd launch an app that shows a tree with all the hardware. Try to find the USB-node, and see if Windows tries adding a piece of hardware - there'd be a node appearing and disappearing in sync with the sound.

If you do find one, disable it.

If that fails, download TweakUI and disable every drive that you're not currently using.

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Does your computer have a media card reader? If so, that's probably where all those drives are coming from. Each one of those card types has an allocated virtual drive to load to.

Now, to get to your actual problem, it sounds like you're having a problem with some USB peripheral, the drives appearing and disappearing is probably just a symptom of the real problem (i.e. it keeps trying to refresh). The problem can really be anything USB (including your keyboard or mouse) or even one of the USB chips that's malfunctioning (or the power to it is dropping below whatever is it's minimum).

To troubleshoot:
- Disconnect ALL external USB items and see if problem appears.
- Try to find old style keyboard and mouse to drive.
- Disable the media card reader on the device manager if there.
- Start in safe mode and see if problem occurs there.
- If problem still persists... you'll need more experienced help (need to check voltage levels to USB chips, may be problem with motherboard or powersupply... more likely motherboard since the power to the chips should be going through a regulator on the motherboard).

Thanks, I'll try all this

If it's not broken, fix it until it is