by DONALD CALLOWAY
Posted September 26, 2009; The Chronicler’s Web
CLARKSBURG, WV — I’ve been using the Clickfree Model HD225 Automatic Backup storage device from Storage Appliance Corp. for a couple of years now and just love the convenience of being able to simply plug in the device to my Windows PCs’ USB port and let the device take care of the backing up all my important files on all my computers running Windows Vista Home Premium. It couldn’t be easier using the device to safely store over 400 different file types, including emails and photos, for retrieval and reloading in the event of a dreaded system hard drive crash.
All was well until about 5 months ago when my Clickfree device suddenly and inexplicably stopped functioning as expected when I plugged it in to one of my desktop PCs. Instead of booting up automatically and starting the search for files to backup as usual, the device merely presented a Windows explorer view of the devices storage and system drives used to perform the backup. For months I tried in vain to figure out on my own why my Clickfree worked just fine on all my other PCs except my desktop with the problem. After getting nowhere, I enlisted the help of a Clickfree support technician. He worked with me on the phone for over an hour, telling me that I must have a problem with my PC. An interesting aspect of the issue I was having was the Clickfree technician had me execute a Disk Management view of my system with the Clickfree device plugged in and was baffled as to why my Clickfree system drive properties showed it as an HFS file system rather than the usual CDFS file system. Incidentally, the HFS file system is used by linux systems and the Mac from Apple Macintosh. Frustrated even further, I enlisted the help of my brother who is a computer technician with a master’s degree in IT. He asked if I had ever dual-booted Linux on my PC with the problem, and I told him that I had. He suspected the problem may be due to the linux partition still residing on the hard drive. He suspected the Clickfree device (which can backup both PCs and Mac’s) might be seeing that partition and defaulting to Mac rather than PC backup mode. So, I deleted the linux partition and incorporated the unallocated disk space to my system’s C:/ drive, and finally fixed the Vista boot image. All that work turned out for naught as the problem still persisted.
Then, it struck me. My Clickfree device must think it’s plugged into a Mac. And since I’ve eliminated the linux partition that could have caused my Clickfree to think I’m using a Mac, what could still be causing the problem? I had in essence eliminated hardware as a potential problem, so the only logical conclusion was I hadn’t considered that there might be a software issue causing the problem.
Going on the assumption that a software incompatibility might be the solution to my problem, my approach to figuring out what software that might be was to look on my Clickfree device to see when the last successful backup of my problem PC had occurred. The answer was 4/17/09. I then viewed the installed software on my system and noticed there was a program installed on my PC on 4/17/09. That software was XPlay 3 from Mediafour. I immediately Binged XPlay 3 in my IE8 web browser and proceeded to read about what it does. When I read that XPlay 3 allows direct access to your iPod by listing it as a drive on your system when you plug your iPod into your system’s USB port, I knew I had stumbled on the answer to my problem. When I plugged my Clickfree device into my USB port, I surmised XPlay 3 was seeing this device as an iPod, or an Apple Macintosh device, hence the reason for creating a drive with the HFS file system rather than the CDFS file system. Suspecting this as the problem, I uninstalled XPlay 3 and rebooted my PC. As I expected, after plugging in my Clickfree device to my PC, it resumed functioning as an automatic system backup device as before.
Therefore, for those of you who use Clickfree on a Windows PC and also own an iPod, don’t download and install XPlay 3 as this software will render your Clickfree device essentially inoperable. Incidentally, this problem has not been tested on a Mac.
Excellent! The advice I gave you pointed you in the right direction, but you still needed to figure out why the HFS virtual CD ROM drive was being installed rather than a CDFS virtual Drive and, suspecting XPlay 3 as a potential culprit was ingenious.
I’m glad that you finally figured it out. I would let technical support at ClickFree in on your solution as this may help someone else in the future.
Thank you for posting this Mr. Calloway. I am the COO for Clickfree and noticed your posting come up on a Google alert today. I will advise my team to keep an eye out for this as well as investigate if we can make some changes to avoid it happening in the future for others.
You are my new hero. I have had problems for over 18months with several USB Wireless Modems not working, and most recently a new ClickFree Wireless Backup HDD. When plugged in it will simply not auto run and will not run manually. I tried on my other 2 laptops and its fine. I then noticed that the file system was reading as an HFS+ rather than a CDFS and spent 4 days solid trying to find a solution. Then I stumbled onto your site and knew before I was half way through the article that this was the fix I was looking for. Pity about Xplay, I did like its simplicity but if its got to go,,,,,,,. Oh and Mr COO who thanked Mr Calloway above, your Tech staff still dont know about this fix.
Again, THANKYOU, my life will be so much easier now. I may even sleep at night without fitfull dreams of computer crashes.
I have an issue which may be related to this problem. There seems to be a conflict between the Clickfree Backup software installed on my Vista laptop and a Conexant USB modem I use at the cottage for internet connectivity. However it’s the modem that suffers not Clickfree. When I plug it in with Clickfree installed dialing out always fails with RASClient error 633. If I deinstall Clickfree it works fine. Would like to know if there is a fix from Clickfree for this problem
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