BaseCamp 4.5.0 versus Windows 10

I haven't been able to find any reason why my external USB drives are no longer appearing in "Devices and Printers". Devices and Printers has an icon for my C: drive, but no other drive. No icons for USB external hard drives, flash drives, or card readers. All I have are non-drive devices and printers. I tried a card reader/SD card on Windows 7 and an icon showed up immediately in Devices and Printers. The same device on Windows 10 shows nothing in Devices and Printers.

Question: Does anyone that is on Windows 10 have an external USB drive (hard or flash) that DOES show up in Devices and Printers?

Start -> Settings -> Devices -> scroll to bottom -> Devices and Printers

BC 4.5 and Windows 10 Pro release with all current updates. I can see my Western Digital 3TB USB external drive under Devices and Printers. It shows up as Western Digital MyBook as a direct connected USB 3.0 device. My Garmin Montana 600 also sort of shows up . I see an entry for USB Mass Storage Device and when I check the properties is's the Montana with two entries; a Flash USB device and a SD card USB device. So far, I've not had any issues with BC 4.5 and my Windows 10 setup.

Devices and Printers

Thanks. It looks like my Devices and Printers is busted. There is a nice list of devices and printers but missing is all my external drives, and also my only HP printer. I tried installing the HP drivers and nothing showed up. I tried deleting one for my dvd burner and nothing happened. The list appears to be frozen.

My guess is that the missing external drives is why the Garimn programs are unhappy.

I have no idea how to unfreeze the list so it's back to Google again. If anyone knows how that list is built/maintained I'd sure appreciate the info.

Devices and Printers

Thanks for that. It seems now that my Devices and Printers list is broken. My external drives (flash and hard) do not show up in the list. Add device finds nothing to add. My only HP printer is also missing and that one won't add either. I also tried deleting a device and nothing happens. For whatever reason the list appears to be frozen. There is currenty 6 devices and 4 printers, and so far I haven't been able to make that budge either up or down.

The theory being that Garmin programs (all except Express) are scanning that list to find my drives (of the GPS) and nothing is there. I've send a few hours looking around in the registry and so far haven't figured out what makes that list work, or not work. I'm not sure what to try next. I'm seriously dreading having to do a clean install to fix this.

I tried Win10 but didn't like it so reverted to Win7, seems to me that Win10 wants to shove a lot of stuff down your throat that you don't want and breaks things on the way. I'll wait a few years ....

Soem progress

In an effort to see if I could get the list of devices/printers to change at all, I deleted most of the default printers, such as the Microsoft Print to PDF. I also deleted the Printers and Printer Queue in Device Manager. That did modify the list and now I had no printers at all. I added back my HP printer and while it showed up in Device Manager, Devices and Printers still had no printers at all.

I've spent so much time in the registry I practically have it memorized. :-)

Because I'd run out of other ideas, I turned my attention to services, looking at every one that wasn't running (for whatever reason). I found an interesting sounding one, the Device Setup Manager. It was disabled. The description says "Enables the detection, download and installation of device-related software. If this service is disabled, devices may be configured with outdated software, and may not work correctly."

That sounded good so I changed it to Automatic (Trigger Start) and started it. Immediately my Devices and Printer list started populating. By the time it stopped it had added zillions of devices and multiple printers, including my HP printer.

So I think I've fixed the problem I was having with Devices and Printers list being frozen. Also shown there under Devices are many of my external drives, finally.

It's not out of the question that I was the one that disabled it, perhaps during all the news stories about the Windows 10 forced driver updates Microsoft is doing now. Something I read may have recommended disabling that service, but I have no memory of it.

The bad news is BaseCamp still doesn't see the GPS, so this may have been a wild goose chase. But at least I got SOMETHING working.

Device Setup Manager

As best I can tell the default is Manual with Trigger Start so I set mine that way and it seems to work. My Devices and Printers is looking much better.

System Information

For those that can't get BaseCamp to work on Windows 10, here are some more details. This is about BaseCamp, not the eject problem, though they might be related.

As donald01 said, it's a Windows 10 bug. Here is what I think Windows 10 is doing wrong.

Windows has a tool called System Information Tool. On Windows 10 it's in the menu under Windows Administrative Tools. On Windows 7 it's under Accessories.

Using that tool I can display a lot of information about the various system components, including disk drives. On Windows 7 looking under System Summary -> Components -> Storage -> Drives I see for the GPS this (the GPS is the E: drive):

Drive E:
Description Removable Disk

If I look in the same place using the same tool on Windows 10 I see (the GPS is the S: drive):

Drive S:
Description Local Fixed Disk
Compressed No
File System FAT32
Size 7.29 GB (7,826,690,048 bytes)
Free Space 2.20 GB (2,363,719,680 bytes)
Volume Name GARMIN
Volume Serial Number 6C6455E6

Under Windows 7 it is classified as a Removable Disk. Makes sense for a portable GPS. But under Windows 10 it shows as a Local Fixed Disk which makes no sense at all. It seems reasonable to assume that the Garmin programs are trying to find the GPS by looking at only the Removable drives, so it never sees the GPS.

I too think that makes it a Microsoft bug. Their disk types are hosed. However, as is often the case, we may find out that Microsoft made that change on purpose, perhaps as a way to fix other problems/bugs. Garmin could fix it easily by scanning both disk types, but they'd have to rerelease a whole bunch of programs, some of which are no longer supported (e.g. MapSource). Nasty.

My guess it there probably a whole bunch of software out there that makes decisions based on the disk types. Microsoft may have no choice but to change it back.

In the meantime this seems to imply that NO Windows 10 system will talk to a Garmin GPS, which I know is not the case. My brother has a AMD Windows 10 system that does NOT have this bug. BaseCamp works fine for him. It maybe Intel versus AMD, or chipset related, or disk controller driver related, etc. Anyway, I don't have access to enough systems to find a pattern.

Garmin did tell me that Garmin Express uses a different method than the other programs (e.g. BaseCamp) to find the GPS, which explains why Express works ok on Windows 10.

Hopefully the case donald01 opened will yield a fix soon.

Bruce.

No Change

I had installed today's update just prior to my post which made no difference at all. BaseCamp still refuses to see the GPS and all removable drives are being detected as Local Fixed Disk. I rebooted and checked for more updates but it now says I'm current on all updates.

So no change. BaseCamp is still DOA for me.

Removable

If I were you I would wait till Microsoft release a fix before doing a clean install (see case # in post 2). The reason I think this is a bug in win10 is that if I mount a virtual removable drive BC can see it. The only drives that BC can't see are physical removable disc drive, plus there is a bunch of other people that are having this problem since upgrading.
You can try mounting a virtual drive with Imdisk virtual driver http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/

In playing with that driver, I don't think it's virtual versus physical that makes the difference. I think it's anything marked as removable. Check the drive letter properties. If it says Local Disk, it ain't gonna work. If it says Removable, then it works with BaseCamp.

If that virtual driver is configured as a fixed (non removable) disk, BaseCamp doesn't see it.

The problem is that my Windows 10 says Local Disk for everything, even clearly removable drives like thumb/flash drives.

I should also note that apparently the drive type is stored in multiple places, depending on how you display it. For example checking the drive letter properties never says Removable, but diskpart -> list volume does say Removable. The drive letter properties seems to be the one BaseCamp uses to decide if it's a removable drive or not.