USB storage devices not working

[8bit]

So lately none of my USB storage devices seem to work. I plug them in, they light up but never mount. If I look in Device Manager, I can see the device in the tree with the yellow ! icon. Looking in the properties for the device shows the message "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39) Object Name not found."

This has happened with a few different USB flash drives and hard disks and my iPod nano. Doesn't seem to matter which USB socket I connect them to. Other USB devices (keyboard, mouse, headset etc.) work fine. I've tried disabling fast startup and uninstalling the drivers for the USB controllers via device manager, no joy.

Win10 Home x64, i7-6700K, MSI Z170A-G43 Plus, 16GB RAM, zero will-to-live...

[wazzickle]

Do they work in other PCs? Don't try now - I'm wondering about the possibility they've been infected somehow, so the question is whether they have been working but not on your PC. How on top of your security are you, have you run a virusscan recently?

When did this start happening? Did they all happen at once, or was there a period where one worked but the other didn't?

Problem is likely with the motherboard. First port of call is to google around everything you can around the search terms 'MSI Z170A-G43' 'USB' 'STORAGE' 'code 39' etc to see if anyone else has experienced similar problems.

By any chance are all your storage devices USB3 and your others 2? Have you gone into disk management?

[8bit]

I think this has been happening since I built this PC, a couple of months ago. At that point I reinstalled Windows 10 via the install/restore/recovery special boot option.

I'm pretty careful regarding security. I have Avast anti-virus running at all times and I don't really do anything "high-risk" regarding viruses. Some of the devices I tried tonight before posting my original thread haven't been in the PC since I built it. One of the hard drives I had a problem with belongs to a friend, it worked in my work PC but not this one. That's what prompted me to investigate and test.

I did a bit of Googling and found a few common suggestions; one was the uninstalling and reinstalling USB controller drivers; the other was disallowing Windows from shutting them down to save power and the third was disabling fast boot. Nothing shows up in disk management.

[Bonebreaker777]

Do you use 'sleep' or 'hibernation'? Some people I know had problems with them while having USB devices plugged in after waking up the machine - but only with Win7.

Fast boot 'should' only affect events during the boot sequence (can't boot from USB devices, etc).

I think it is a driver issue. Did you tried to fully uninstall the drivers (including deleting the software) then install new ones from Intel?

[8bit]

No, I never use sleep or hibernate; the PC boots so quickly even with fast startup disabled that there's no need. I disabled fast startup because I read that it stores the kernel and loaded drivers to disk on shutdown so I wanted to be sure that this wasn't preventing uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers from fixing the issue, if that was in fact the fault.

I tried the Intel website, struggled to find anything there and tried the driver auto update utility which didn't find anything either.

I'm not convinced this is a driver issue; my motherboard seems to have two USB controllers, the Intel one and an ASMedia USB3.1 controller too. I don't know which ports are attached to which controller but I can't get USB storage devices working in any of them. Also, as above, other USB devices work fine.

[8bit]

Solved. Turned out to be a problem caused by Acronis TrueImage. I was using this on Windows 7 and it got carried over when the machine originally upgraded to Win10 and kept working fine with no such problems. When I rebuilt the machine I installed TrueImage and it never really worked right but I didn't get round to resolving the problems or uninstalling.

Sorted now in any case, thanks to those who contributed.