I have several old laptop hard drives that I use in cheap USB drive enclosures for backing up or sharing data. These things are great and then generally just work, even though you can buy them for as little as $3.82 from Amazon!

I recently plugged one of these drives into a new computer and, although the drive initially worked, it randomly disconnected after only a few minutes of use. I was only able to get it working again by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Once again it disconnected a few minutes later. This cycle continued as I tried to troubleshoot the problem by changing power settings, switching USB cables, switching USB ports, and testing the connection of the drive in the enclosure. Nothing I changed made a difference and the random disconnections continued every few minutes.

It finally occurred to me to try reinstalling the device driver for the HDD. So I uninstalled the driver and rebooted Windows. After starting back up Windows found the drive, installed the driver, and the problem went away.

I don’t know what caused the issue in the first place, but uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers worked perfectly. This is a good reminder that many USB device issues are driver related and can be resolved by reinstalling the drivers. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Device Manager (click the Start Menu and type “Device Manager” in the search window)
2. Navigate the Device Manager menu to the device in question. For me this was a “Disk Drive”
3. Select your device, right click on it, and choose “Uninstall”
4. Reboot and see what happens.

Note that this issue and resolution is essentially the same for all recent versions of Windows, including XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (at least ).

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