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We have been experiencing a VERY odd error and I have no idea where to go from here. When users are logging in to a Standalone Windows 2008 R2 server in workgroup configuration, it causes the following error:

Event Log: System Event Source: Disk Event ID: 11 Research
Severity: Error
Details: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR(number of drive varies).

There are multiple USB drives plugged in, and the drive that detects the error varies. I have tried 5 different drives, and 2 thumb drives, and all will throw this error periodically. It seems to be only 1 drive at a time that will throw this error.

1)THE DRIVES HAVE ALL BEEN VERIFIED CLEAN WITH MULTIPLE CHKDSKS 2)THE MOTHERBOARD ON THE SERVER HAS BEEN REPLACED TWICE 3)Switching ports does not affect the error. As I said, the MB was also replaced 3)The issue appears EXACTLY when a user logs in

Has anyone out there seen ANYTHING similar? Thanks in advance!

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3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

I have never seen that exact situtaion but something that might be worth looking into is if the is some kind of IRQ conflict between those devices . Conflicting devices are indicated by an exclamation or question mark in the device manager list. It could be the case that you have more then one usb device that is programmed at the hardware level to only use the same specific IRQs.

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There were no conflicting IRQ's but I appreciate the post! – Az. May 18 '11 at 0:01
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This seems to be related to SMART monitoring, and if you have verified with chkdsk that the drives are ok, then you should just ignore the error.

Windows logs a wealth of warnings and errors to the event log, many of which can, unfortunately, be ignored. We get errors like this frequently (on workstations mostly, with a variety of USB sticks), and usually ignore all errors that come from removable devices (as indicated by the \DRxx in the path to the drive.

You could try and disable S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on that computer if you don't have any other SATA drives in the computer. But quite frankly, I would just ignore them.

You should also check out the first comment here: http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=11&eventno=616&source=Disk&phase=1.

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What is concerning me is that these errors are being thrown at user logins. I am wondering why a removable drive is picking up a controller error simply when someone logs into the server. – Az. May 18 '11 at 0:06
Windows must query the drives when a user logs in, maybe explorer.exe. The drives are obviously mounted regardless whether a user is logged in or not, but I'm assuming some Windows process is accessing the drives during the login. You could run Process Monitor in a different session to see which process(es) access the drive(s), but in the end it won't really help. I would just ignore them. – Lucky Luke May 18 '11 at 2:28
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I gave both people who responded credit for this because the actual solution was a weird one. Despite showing no errors, I narrowed the problem down to one particular model of removable Hard Drive (Seagate Freeagent 300gb GO drive). When I disabled all these devices, the problem went away on all drives. Very Weird. Reaffirms my dislike of Seagate. Thanks to all.

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