P5Q DELUXE, USB Driver QUIRK

I have two external usb drives and once in a while one won't show up in
windows explorer. Could it be that I need to re-load the usb driver? I am
confused as to which driver to download. Can someone lead me in the right
direction please? Thank you.

BTW, I am not using ESATA, gave up on that disaster long ago!

 

If this is a USB2 driver, the driver actually comes from Microsoft.

What'd you'd do is, first start with your Intel chipset. Find the
Intel chipset download (something like INFINST or similar). Now,
examine the README, to find out how to get the .exe to deposit
all the installer files into one directory. When you look in there,
you'll find the Intel USB installer has a line like

include blahblah.inf

which is a call to the Microsoft installer. So the Intel installer
adds very little to the picture. It just calls the Microsoft driver
already in the OS. And adds a descriptive line of text, to Device
Manager, identifying the USB items.

Alternately, you can start with Device Manager, and look at the
drivers used for each device in question. How many of the drivers
are traceable to Intel ? How many to Microsoft ? Microsoft
won't allow companies like Intel, to offer the actual USB2 driver,
as the driver belongs to Microsoft. And like many other USB stack
items, Microsoft designed them to standards, so they'll work on
more pieces of hardware. As long as the hardware has the necessary
base register set and responses, then the driver can work.

I don't know what the situation is like on USB3. The driver there,
might be more specific to the various host chips. I don't know
if Microsoft was ready with a USB3 driver, the first day the
NEC chip became available. And there might be as many as three
other brands of host chip now - and it's unlikely they'd just
"borrow" the NEC driver. So this would be a separate research topic
(and as I don't have any USB3 motherboards here, I can't even start
with some practical experiments).

Intel still doesn't have native USB3, as far as I know, so there
is no reason for Intel to be addressing USB3 in their INFINST type
driver packages. Intel has "missed the boat" on USB3, instead
having some other strategy up their sleeve. Seeing as they make
virtually all the chipsets now for their processors, they hardly
need a strategy (it's the Intel "happy meal" approach). And if a
motherboard manufacturer doesn't like what Intel has done, they
can always add a NEC USB3 chip and bump the price $10 to $25.

One disadvantage of such an approach, is you're less likely to be
able to boot at USB3 speeds. The BIOS usually only supports booting
via chipset specific logic blocks. And a reason for that,
is a lot of the BIOS is written by Award/AMI/Phoenix, and a lot
less of it, by the motherboard manufacturer. And those companies
work on basic support for the chipsets, not for third party
chips like the NEC USB3. If any board is going to be booting from
USB3 right now, it's likely to be an AMD A75 FCH based motherboard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_chipsets

*******

To answer your original question, no, I don't see a point in
reinstalling the driver package.

It's possible there is something bonkers in the registry,
and you can wipe out the USB stack and let Windows reload
it. An example of such a procedure is here.

http://www.usbman.com/Guides/Cleanup Device Manager Safe Mode.htm

A semi-automated way of doing it, is via a script based on "devcon".

RenewUSB.bat
http://www.robvanderwoude.com/devcon.php

Both of those options are "backup before doing this" material.

If you don't use those procedures, and just reinstall drivers,
the result is likely to be the registry content is neatly preserved,
problems and all.

In past years, you could delete everything under ENUM and let
Windows rediscover it all. But that's a bit extreme.

*******

Strictly speaking, every USB device should have a serial number in its
data structure. Having a serial number, allows the OS to "track" when
a device moves from one port to another. So that a lot of
duplicate entries don't end up on the system. The OS can still
handle devices without serial numbers, but there is more
opportunity for surprises later.

*******

Network shares and USB storage can conflict when it comes to
drive letters. So if you were having problems, you might consider
whether any network shares were involved. The following site
has a tool for managing drive letters - and other pages on this
site are very useful for understanding USB storage issues.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Paul

 

Unlikely that a USB driver is at fault.
When you next plug-in the drive and it doesn't show in explorer,
have a look in device manager and disk management, to see if
the drive is actually there, but simply has no letter assigned.
If so, then see Pauls's reply regarding where to look to solve
that.