I had a client that could not get a USB drive to show up properly in
their system. When they plugged in the USB drive, the capacity showed
as 0 bytes available and zero bytes used in a RAW format.
If you have plugged in a USB device (usually a mass storage device)
into a computer and it doesnt work, here are some basic troubleshooting
steps to resolve the problem.
First, you want to rule out any
problems with the device itself. A good way to do this is to plug the
USB device into a different computer to see if it works there. If it
does not work in a different computer, then the problem is with the
device itself. USB devices, although very handy and portable can fail
just like any other device.
However, if the USB device works in another computer system, then the
problem lies with the configuration of the computer where the device
did not work.
In my case, the drive did work in another system just fine. However it
showed up as zero bytes available and 0 bytes capacity in this
particular system. I checked everything associated with a
malfunctioning USB drive including the following:
1)
If you are using a USB cable with your device, check the cable to make
sure it matches the speed of the device. Use USB 2.0 cables with USB
2.0 devices and USB 1.1 cables with USB 1.1 devices. Swap cables and
check the device, if this does not work, proceed to Step 2.
2)
Next, open Device Manager and look under the heading for USB Serial Bus
Controllers. If there is a device with a yellow exclamation mark next
to it such as USB Mass Storage Device. Double-click on the entry and
check the Device Status. If the status shows something like
"This device cannot
start. (Code 10)"
proceed to then you want to run through the steps to fix a
USB Error Code 10.
3) If the USB drive is a U3 variety, you may want to back up the data on the drive to another device and then either
uninstall or reinstall the U3 software 4) Check for viruses and rootkits. This is a basic step, however many
times malware issues will have you running in the opposite
direction to avoid detection.
Conclusion
A check with
Malwarebytes
AntiMalware turned up nothing. However when I ran a check for
the Alureon rootkit with
TDSSKiller
from Kaspersky, I discovered the hard drive was infected
with Rootkit.Boot.Sinowal.b. Curing the infection with
TDSSKiller and rebooting solved the problem with the unresponsive USB
Drive and the Zero byte capacity.
The valuable lesson in this situation is to always run a thorough
antivirus, spyware, and malware check of your system before assuming a
hardware issue.