Windows 10: External hard drive not showing up after sleep and disconnect (Code 38

I have a Windows 10 laptop with a couple external hard drives connected to it. I disconnect the hard drive and put it to sleep and take it to work. After coming home I reconnect them. I can hear the sound effects of connecting and disconnecting, but they never show up in my computer, not even in disk management.

I can see them in device manager. Universal Serial Bus controllers -> USB mass storage device, with a yellow exclamation mark. I checked and the error message is :

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware because a previous instance of the device driver is still in memory. (Code 38)

This can be fixed by restarting the computer and I googled for a solution to no avail. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers.

So if anyone knows how to fix this, please tell me so I don't have to restart computer all the time, thank you.

:)

 

How do I reconnect an external hard drive to my computer? The control panel shows it as being there, but the File History shows it as disconnected no matter what I do?

My external hard drive suddenly showed as disconnected on my computer. When I look on the control panel it shows as connected and, upon going into properties, it shows the hard drive is working properly. However, when I click on File History, it shows the
ext. hard drive as disconnected. I have tried to update the driver, but get a message that the driver is up-to-date. I have tried to uninstall and reinstall by restarting the computer, but I still get the same "disconnected" message. I'm at wits end. Can anyone
suggest another way?

 

E-SATA drive shows previously connected hd’s content

I have two 1TB (Lacie) external e-sata drives...

After shutting down pc, swapping drives over and booting up, windows10 shows hd’s volume label, folders and files from the disconnected drive to be on that now connected second drive.

How do i get windows to show the second hard drive’s true content? (without losing data)

 

You could try enabling automount and rebooting, which will bring this volume online and keep it online through subsequent reboots. Enabling automount can be done by opening a Command Prompt window and invoking DISKPART -> automount enable -> exit