Did some mods to my hard drive with partition magic, there was an error message and I lost a lot of stuff which I have got back with RecoverMyFiles.

But xp now will not recognise my mass storage device and shows error message 10 cannot start device.

Anyone had this ?

Could be registry problem , can anyone recommend a good Registry repair tool?

You might just need to reinstall the drivers for it - what kind of device is it?

Its an external USB hard drive , it never had any drivers.

silly thing is that everything else usb is still working. printer ,mouse, even usb memory sticks, and camera cards!!

are you using it thru a hub? i had issues with my bluetooth dongle and they only went away when i plugged it into the pc itself and not the USB hub on the desk.

Worth a try?

I had that problem last year with an iPod.
I sent it back to Apple twice before I accepted that the problem was with XP.
The only solution I found was to reinstall XP - after wasting hours and hours of google searches and fixes to registry and all sorts of other things.

I've had the same symptoms before which was caused by a corrupted 'inf' (setup information) file in the cache. You can force windows to rebuild the inf cache by deleteing it and you should find it at "C:WINDOWSinfinfcache.1" if you are running XP.

You will need to ensure you have explorer set to show file extensions and hidden/system files (which should have been be the default setting IMO, stupid MS). Restart you machine after deleting the file.


[Edited on 10/10/08 by MikeRJ]

You can also get these problems with corrupted USB driver or if you're running it via a passive USB port (ie if the HD doesn't have an external power supply and you're using the USB to supply the power).

I had terrible fun and games (if that's not an oxymoron) with I/O errors on my Ipod touch until I worked out that it was that occuring...