You might have a corrupted boot volume on your USB hard drive or flash drive.
If you remedy the driver issue but still can’t connect to the device, that is a symptom of damage to the device itself, not simply a problem with its drivers.
Sometimes these error messages can be a symptom of a much graver underlying issue. This corruption could even damage the boot sector and make it impossible to access any of your data! While it’s rare for these things to happen, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. But if you have recently written data to the device, or if you unplug the device while writing data, you could end up corrupting it. Typically unplugging a USB device without ejecting it from the Windows taskbar first will do no harm. Unplugging a USB device, whether a USB flash drive or an external disk, without properly ejecting it can cause boot sector corruption. Is it necessary to eject a USB flash drive?
