Windows 10: USB Mass Storage Device (Code38)

Hi All


I've been working on this issue for a few weeks months now and still no joy.

My issue is as follows and I hope someone can point me in the right direction;


If I boot the workstation fresh my external USB drive is present and works.

That night I am able to run the backup successfully.

But...

In the morning when we swap the backup drives no drive appears in the File Explorer or in the Disk manager and the Device Manager shows the errors below.

To get the drives back we need to reboot the computer.








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

The driver could not be loaded because a previous version of the driver is still in memory.




I've run all the software and hardware updates I can and when I try to update the windows driver for this device it says that the driver is the latest version.


Backup assist (Backup software) say it's not their software that's causing the issue.

Dell say that its not a hardware issue with the computer.

I've uninstalled all Antivirus software.

I've installed the WD drive utilities to check the drives and to make sure the drivers are up to date.



It feels like a windows 10 update issue but I can't put my finger on it, as it was all working really well and no changes were made except of cause Windows Updates.


Any suggestions will be welcome.


---------------------------------------------------------------

I previously posted this issue here


https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-files/usb-mass-storage-device-code38/b1d0ee48-9f36-41d9-bc4b-1c0b5e3b38c1

But I really don't think that running the troubleshooting every week or fortnight is a solution. I've now seen this issue on multiple customer computers/servers. I've tried contacting Microsoft directly, but as of yet no solution.


Am I doing something wrong?






:)

 

how to change "USB attached SCSI mass storage device" to "USB mass storage device"

Hi,

We would like to know the additional information to better assist you with USB mass storage concern. Kindly answer the following questions below:

• Do yo have an updated Windows 10 on your computer?
• What are the troubleshooting steps you've done so far after your media player stopped recognizing the portable drive?
• Do you have the updated USB driver on the current operating system that you are using?

We are looking forward to your response.

Regards.

 

how to change "USB attached SCSI mass storage device" to "USB mass storage device"

Hi there:

I have a Seagate USB portable drive and I mainly use it to connect to my ASUS Oplay! media player to watch the content on TV.

This device use to be an USB mass storage device.

Recently, I noticed whenever I eject my seagte portable drive, the device is showing as ""USB attached SCSI mass storage device" instead of a regular "USB mass storage device". This is when my media player stopped recognising the portable drive (showing
the device is not supported). The portable drive works fine on my Windows 10 PC, just not recognising by my media player anymore.

Wondering if anyone can point out how I can restore my portable hard drive back to a generic USB mass storage device instead of being a "USB attached SCSI mass storage device".

Thank you.

 

Block USB access, but allow only specific ones (in particular, one USB mass storage device)

Following @Ramhound's suggestion, I got it working using group policy.

The general direction is documented here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2007.06.grouppolicy.aspx

In particular, the "Prevent installation of removable devices" rule is what I need.

So here's a summary of what I ended up doing:

1. In Device Manger, uninstall all USB devices that I don't want, including the ones that are currently not connected - there's an environment variable called DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES that enables the display of installed, but currently disconnected devices; just search the web for "DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES";
   
2. Install the USB device that I want; in this case, a USB mass storage device;
   
3. Enable the "Prevent installation of removable devices" rule in Group Policy.
   

Caveat emptor:

1. Group policy probably can't effectively block some devices that don't expose a unique serial ID. E.g if a certain vendor model of USB mass storage device doesn't expose a unique serial ID, and you have installed one, then group policy might allow any other instances of the same vendor model to be mounted. I don't have such a model of USB mass storage device with me, so I can't really verify.
   
2. As far as I understand, USB device IDs are not signed and thus cannot be verified - i.e. if a USB device claims to be a certain device, with a particular serial ID, there is no way for the computer to tell whether that's true. A bad guy could build a USB device with forged USB device ID and forged serial ID, in order to get it accepted by you computer, though even then.
   

With all that said, this solution works if you assume that all your devices expose unique serial IDs and that nobody tries to forge a USB device to get it accepted by your computer.