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Trouble with identifying USB 2.0 port for external hard drive and acce


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#1
Sytheii

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Hi again!

Second question here that I have posted about my computer, hope you guys can help me out with an answer.
I have an external hard drive, its a maxtor onetouch 4 plus terabyte drive, and it connects to my computer via a mini usb to usb cable(cable supplied by manufacturer.)
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I at one time had it connected to my computer through my monitor which is also a USB hub, but I rerouted things because I figured it would be better to have it go strait to my system since it does a lot of transferring of files.

Also the reason I did this was to try to solve 2 issues i had with the external drive, in which;

(1st) when i would access the drive, there would be a slight waiting time, 8 to 10 seconds and the light on the front of the drive would blink like it was spooling up or something, between opening up an explorer window of the drive, and actually being able to navigate through it. After that wait period, any functionality of the drive is fine, unless it remains idle for an unknown amount of time after which the same thing occurs. This is not a really big deal...but i do move stuff around alot and it is getting kind of annoying.

(2nd) issue is the more interesting weird issue. I recently did a reinstall of XP because if this issue. What would happen is this. For the longest time whenever i would reboot my computer after bios loads up, then after the windows loading screen popped up, I would stare at a black monitor for literally 1 to 2 minutes before the windows log on screen appeared. I really hated this, so since i needed to do a reinstall of windows anyways i went ahead and did it.

After my initial install and reboot of the fresh copy of windows, with all devices (including the onetouch) unplugged the computer restarts flawlessly, no black screen, no lag, nada. So i say to myself, ah issue resolved! Then what i do is bring my system back up to date with all device drivers software and so on and have everything connected back up and im back to normal. Now when i start windows, i experience the same black screen in between the windows boot up screen and the windows log on screen, but the duration of the wait time now is somewhere around 10 seconds or so.

(NOTE) I had already double checked in bios before i had reinstalled windows to see if the external HDD was in the boot list, and it was, so i had removed it from that list, saving only the CDROM drive and internal HDD to be in the list. After doing that and rebooting the process was the same, so i dont THINK :) that was the issue.)

So! My two problems now are the lag at start-up as well as the lag with accessing the external HD, AND not knowing whether or not any of my usb ports are 2.0 since the onetouch has 2.0 capabilities. The question of whether or not it is hooked up into a 2.0 port never came up before, but apparently windows knows that it is not currently hooked up into a 2.0 port, but displays that i do have at least one 2.0 capable port. The reason i know this, is recently when i plugged it back into my computer, windows popped up a window saying this.

So...i will give you a brief rundown of all the usb ports my computer has.

On the laptop there are 4 total, 2 on each side.
On one side i have my wireless mouse transmitter plugged in.
On the other side I have the onetouch plugged into one port, and my GATEWAY FPD2485W TFT LCD Monitor's usb hub plugged into the other one.

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On the monitor there are a total of 4 usb ports available to use, two on the side of the monitor, and two underneath the monitor next to the video imputs.
Plugged into the side of the monitor i have my apple usb keyboard plugged in.

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Then Apple usb keyboard additionally has 2 more ports on it.

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Whew. I searched around when i realized that my external wasnt performing at the best to find a way to decipher whether or not my usb ports are 2.0 and i am thoroughly confused. One site post said this: http://ask-leo.com/h...ave_usb_20.html

You can check to see if your USB device is plugged into a usb1.1 or usb2.0 port in the following way:

In Device Manager, click View/Devices By Connection. Expand 'PCI Bus' - you should see your USB controllers listed. Locate your plugged-in one of the subfolders of the controller. If its parent is an "Enhanced" controller, it's operating at USB2.0 - otherwise 1.1

Locate your device in the tree, paying attention as to whether it's under an "Enhanced" controller or Standard.

So ive done that, but im still confused as to what is what.

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Well, i know that was long, but i always feel that more detail is better than less. If you can help me out with my 2.0 usb search as well as the lag with the external HDD and the odd lag at startup, i will be forever grateful.

Thanks in advance!

Edited by Sytheii, 05 November 2009 - 03:56 AM.

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#2
makai

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Hello,
Wow, long description! :)

What you're experiencing is normal. During bootup, Windows needs to poll devices to correctly identify them and assign drive letters, etc. This will take additional time and is why there is a slight delay, or what you term "black screen". This is why if you remove the external drive, boot up is quicker. This is absolutely normal whether it be usb, esata, etc. As for the delay when accessing the external, it's also normal if the drive has "spun down". Laptops are energy conserving and will spin the drives down unless you tell it not to. The delay is due the time the drive needs to spin up before access. You may be able to control spin up/down for your drives in ControlPanel>Power Options. You should be able to set different power profiles for battery and AC, but this will only cause faster access times after bootup... it will not do anything to speed up the initial bootup delay when you first turn on your computer.
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#3
Sytheii

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Hello,
Wow, long description! :)

What you're experiencing is normal. During bootup, Windows needs to poll devices to correctly identify them and assign drive letters, etc. This will take additional time and is why there is a slight delay, or what you term "black screen". This is why if you remove the external drive, boot up is quicker. This is absolutely normal whether it be usb, esata, etc. As for the delay when accessing the external, it's also normal if the drive has "spun down". Laptops are energy conserving and will spin the drives down unless you tell it not to. The delay is due the time the drive needs to spin up before access. You may be able to control spin up/down for your drives in ControlPanel>Power Options. You should be able to set different power profiles for battery and AC, but this will only cause faster access times after bootup... it will not do anything to speed up the initial bootup delay when you first turn on your computer.


Thanks for your quick reply. In power options i see no way to control spinup/down, obviously aside from setting profiles for ac or battery, those i have set as do nothing except for the monitor to shut off if idle...i had heard from a friend that one way to control this from happening was to go to your device manager, go to the first instance of usb root hub, go to properties, then power management, and deselect "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power," and then to repeat that process for every subsequent root hub that you see. I did this, but no noticeable difference occurred, so i reselected all of them....

Any thoughts on how to find out whether or not i have usb 2.0 on my comp?

Also, something occurred to me when i was looking at this picture....they supplied the usb mini to usb cord with the external hdd...but there are also these two ports on the back...could it be that those are usb 2.0 ports, and that i should use one of those instead to connect to my pc? I better go to the manf. site and see if i cant get more info on that.
Initially i had thought those were uh...firewire? which my computer does not have, so i disregarded them. I am shamed to say that i dont know if there are any physical differences between usb 2.0 and older...i had assumed it was simply a difference in management and not in hardware. Can anyone correctly identify the YELLOW CIRCLED ports?

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Also, in regards to your comments about the lag times being normal...here's some other info about that drive if you don't know. These drives are marketed as drives with software on them that can auto backup your system and restore it and all that jazz, kind of like an idiot buffer or some such thing. I just bought it cause it was a terabyte and i needed to back up large amounts of data. The software that comes on the drive, well, i never installed it, because windows auto recognizes it and it works now as it is as an external hd, so its fine for me. But one thing i noticed about it while i have been working on the drive, is that occasionaly in the root drive folder, new interesting looking folders appear, that seem to be associated with windows, or the updating of windows or some such thing. The weird thing is, if i try to go into any of the subfolders of these random unknown folders, i get a windows message saying e:\blahblahblah is not accesible, access is denied. I am starting to wonder What the... this stuff is.....

Could there be some sort of communication that i have not set up between my pc and the onetouch that is happening at startup or during normal use that is causing the longer than normal startup times that i have experienced in the past? check out this screen shot with the folders i am talking about... that I NEVER CREATED, but seem to be there for a good reason, as well as one in which i have opened all of the folders with their contents on one big screenshot.

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hmmm....zoom on last pic is pretty bad...here is direct link
http://i20.photobuck...comp/weird2.jpg
well shoot! that didnt work either...i guess photobucket scales them down for some reason......arg.

Again, Thanks for reading, and i apologize if i am being tangential in my explanation...but i feel some of these issues might be linked, and i am dumbfounded by origins.

Edited by Sytheii, 05 November 2009 - 05:18 AM.

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#4
makai

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In power options i see no way to control spinup/down

You won't see spin up/down, but you might see an option to turn off hard disks after a certain amount of time.

[attachment=35582:ScreenShot004.jpg]This entry in Device manager means you have USB 2.0 active. Anytime you see "Enhanced", it means USB 2.0

Also, something occurred to me when i was looking at this picture....they supplied the usb mini to usb cord with the external hdd...but there are also these two ports on the back...could it be that those are usb 2.0 ports, and that i should use one of those instead to connect to my pc?

They look like Firewire, although I can't really tell because the photo is so blurry. Don't you have a manual for this thing?

As far as the junk put on the drive by the manufacture... this is common on some flash drives also. Did you ever format the drive? If you want to get rid of the junk, I would temporarily move your data off the drive and save it to you computer, then reformat the drive.
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#5
Sytheii

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In power options i see no way to control spinup/down

You won't see spin up/down, but you might see an option to turn off hard disks after a certain amount of time.

[attachment=35582:ScreenShot004.jpg]This entry in Device manager means you have USB 2.0 active. Anytime you see "Enhanced", it means USB 2.0

Also, something occurred to me when i was looking at this picture....they supplied the usb mini to usb cord with the external hdd...but there are also these two ports on the back...could it be that those are usb 2.0 ports, and that i should use one of those instead to connect to my pc?

They look like Firewire, although I can't really tell because the photo is so blurry. Don't you have a manual for this thing?

As far as the junk put on the drive by the manufacture... this is common on some flash drives also. Did you ever format the drive? If you want to get rid of the junk, I would temporarily move your data off the drive and save it to you computer, then reformat the drive.


ok yes...so enhanced means usb 2.0....i get that...but does the presence of that note mean that all of the usb ports on my PC are 2.0? or could it signify that possibly my monitor with the hub is only usb 2.0 capable? when i look at the tree in the pic provided of devices...it looks to me like the 4 intel 82801 g blah universal host controllers expand to fit the exact layout of my devices and usb tree, as i have noted in my original post...

You see, this is not really explained well on any of the sites i have searched....nor is the answer you provide explanatory enough to definitively convince me of what to do...

SINCE WINDOWS HAS NOTIFIED ME THAT MY EXTERNAL HDD IS NOT PLUGGED INTO a USB 2.0 BUT IT CAN BE, IT EXISTS SOMEWHERE ON MY SYSTEM OR IN MY PERIPHERAL DEVICES...

RighT?

If i assume that the port it is plugged into now which is on the PC is not USB 2.0, which would seem to make sense, since that is the port it was plugged into when the windows notification popped up, can i also reasonably assume that if that is the case even if my monitor's hub is USB 2.0 i wont be able to gain that functionality since in the end the only way to connect the monitor is through my PC which has something OLDER than 2.0 ???


As far as formatting the drive...well, its a terabyte drive and its more than half full...so not easy to accomplish. And what would stop that stuff from just reappearing again later? WHAT GENERATES THOSE FOLDERS WITH INACCESABLE FILES? WHAT IS THE CAUSE OF THAT PHENOMENA?

These are the questions i seek answers to...any takers?

I will check the manual this morning, but regardless of the answer i find in respect to what those ports on the back of the external HD represent, the root of my search i believe, will still focus on figuring out more about my computer's capabilities.

Edited by Sytheii, 05 November 2009 - 12:14 PM.

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#6
Sytheii

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According to this thread on forum: http://forum.noteboo...ad.php?t=112041

Those folders are the result of a windows update, or something similar, which is what i suspected earlier. If that is the case, since they dont take up much space...they arent really a bother...but it would be interesting to find out if there is some kind of option or something that i can edit or change to make this stop happening on my external hard drive...anybody know about this?
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#7
Sytheii

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I did discover on their site that the ports on the back are firewire...dont know why there are 2 of em though. Drive supports firewire and usb 2.0 So thats out of the way...now i can continue to ignore them :)
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#8
123Runner

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I have seen where some USB ports operate at the 1.1 standard and others operate at the 2.0 standard on the same computer/ laptop.

If your drive is saying "It could operate faster", that usually indicates it is at 1.1 version.
Try plugging the drive into each of the other USB ports.

What version of OS are you running?
Is it patched with all of the service packs and updates?
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#9
Sytheii

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I have seen where some USB ports operate at the 1.1 standard and others operate at the 2.0 standard on the same computer/ laptop.

If your drive is saying "It could operate faster", that usually indicates it is at 1.1 version.
Try plugging the drive into each of the other USB ports.

What version of OS are you running?
Is it patched with all of the service packs and updates?


Ok well it's good to know that is a possibility. I had tried this already for the ports actually on my laptop, but unfortunately i did not receive a message when i plugged the drive into each of the ports my laptop had...i then again plugged it into the port it was in originally, and no message then either. :)

Im running xp sp3 all updates and everything.
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#10
Sytheii

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I have seen where some USB ports operate at the 1.1 standard and others operate at the 2.0 standard on the same computer/ laptop.

If your drive is saying "It could operate faster", that usually indicates it is at 1.1 version.
Try plugging the drive into each of the other USB ports.

What version of OS are you running?
Is it patched with all of the service packs and updates?



Found this out there after about 2 aditional google searches...dont know why i didnt check it out before :)

http://www.usb.org/d...icon_design.pdf

The USB + symbol is next to both of my 2 groups of usb ports on my dell laptop. I can only assume that the message i received alerting me it would function better on a 2.0 most have been some kind of fluke...according to that pdf if your computers are made by

· Agere Systems (formerly Lucent)
· Compaq
· Dell
· Gateway
· Hewlett Packard
· IBM
· Intel
· Microsoft
· NEC

look for that symbol that is on page 2 to signify USB 2.0 :)

Also, I am having more problems with my phone and computer....and i just did a reinstall of windows...this is starting to really irk me...

http://discussions.e...s...7&jump=true

http://forums.techgu...tml#post7017784

If any of you folks feel like putting your 2 cents in at these threads please, be my guest, i could use the help.

Edited by Sytheii, 06 November 2009 - 04:13 AM.

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