Please dear God help me fix this sporadically disconnecting Ext. HDD

Hi, RichardDenoncourt
How are you? Welcome to the Microsoft community!
My name is Juliana, I'm an independent advisor, I'm here to help you in the best possible way.

STEP 1

1. Connect your external hard drive to a different USB port

STEP 2
Turn off USB selective suspend
Insufficient power supply is another major factor that causes a hard drive disconnection problem

1. Navigate to Power Options in the Control Panel.
2. On your own power plan, click Change plan settings.
3. Click Change advanced power settings.
4. Go to USB Settings> USB Selective Sleep Configuration and set the Settings to Disabled. Click Apply to save the changes made.

STEP 3
Disable your PC to turn off the mass storage device
1.Press Windows + X to open a menu and choose Device Manager from the list.
2.Go to USB Controllers (universal serial bus)> USB device.
3. Click Power Management and uncheck the box in front of The computer can turn off the device to save power. Click OK to save your changes.

STEP 4
Disable legacy USB support in the BIOS
1.Open Device Manager, locate your external hard drive and double-click it.
2. Navigate to the Policies tab and check Best performance. Now click OK to save your changes.
3. Locate the Intel USB 3.0 extension drive in Device Manager and uninstall it.

STEP 5
Check the disk partition for errors and repair
1.Open "This PC / Computer", right click on the hard drive or partition you want to check and click on "Properties".
2.Select "Tools" and click "Check" under Error checking.
3.The dialog box will appear and select any of the following options to check and repair the hard drive.
4.Select and check the "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Search and try to recover previous sectors" options and click "Start"

If the error persists let us know here again, we will help you.

I hope I have helped you.
Until later!

Ext HDD disconnected again about an hour ago while I was gaming. Completely froze the game. It's maybe the third time this week.

I changed the settings according to articles I saw online, to prevent the hard drive from powering down to save energy, turned off selective suspend, tried different usb drives on the computer itself (not my external USB port extender).

Only thing I haven't tried is ordering a different cord - but if my cord was faulty, why would it work propertly 95% of the time, only disconnecting/reconnecting the external HDD 2-3 times a week? I'm desperate. Do you have any other ideas?

Hi, RichardDenoncourt

How are you? Welcome to the Microsoft community!

My name is Juliana, I'm an independent advisor, I'm here to help you in the best possible way.

STEP 1

1. Connect your external hard drive to a different USB port

STEP 2

Turn off USB selective suspend

Insufficient power supply is another major factor that causes a hard drive disconnection problem

1. Navigate to Power Options in the Control Panel.
2. On your own power plan, click Change plan settings.
3. Click Change advanced power settings.
4. Go to USB Settings> USB Selective Sleep Configuration and set the Settings to Disabled. Click Apply to save the changes made.

STEP 3

Disable your PC to turn off the mass storage device

1.Press Windows + X to open a menu and choose Device Manager from the list.

2.Go to USB Controllers (universal serial bus)> USB device.

3. Click Power Management and uncheck the box in front of The computer can turn off the device to save power. Click OK to save your changes.

STEP 4

Disable legacy USB support in the BIOS

1.Open Device Manager, locate your external hard drive and double-click it.

2. Navigate to the Policies tab and check Best performance. Now click OK to save your changes.
3. Locate the Intel USB 3.0 extension drive in Device Manager and uninstall it.

STEP 5

Check the disk partition for errors and repair

1.Open "This PC / Computer", right click on the hard drive or partition you want to check and click on "Properties".

2.Select "Tools" and click "Check" under Error checking.

3.The dialog box will appear and select any of the following options to check and repair the hard drive.

4.Select and check the "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Search and try to recover previous sectors" options and click "Start"

If the error persists let us know here again, we will help you.

I hope I have helped you.

Until later!

Ok. Let me know if the problem is still occurring

Will do

Thanks Juliana. I scanned the drive and found that it had errors so i went ahead and repaired those.

I also unchecked “The computer can turn off device...” I thought I had done that already but I guess not.

The only problem was with Step 4. There is no policies tab in my hard drive’s menu.

I will let you know how this turns out. Thanks again.