Except that he's having the problem with USB flash drives, not IDE hard drives. (Edit: Sorry, does that refer to the other thread?)
That said, it's worth asking, what are the hard drives on your system, SATA or PATA?
Also, when you say "flash disks", you mean USB flash drives aka USB keys, correct?
If so, next question, do you have a card reader in your system? If so, do you get this error when mounting an SD card or CompactFlash?
Anyway, the fact that you get this error with multiple flash drives tells me that what I said in my last post is likely correct, the problem lies in your USB
controller!
What I'd suggest is that you try mounting a USB key on the back of your system. Those USB ports are
probably on a different controller than the ones in the front. The only real way to tell is to check what device the disk is mounted on after you plug it in, but it's more likely that the back ports are on different controllers
than any of the front ports.
Actually, best of all would be if you have a USB card in one of your PCI or PCI-E slots. On the back of your system, are the USB ports all on the back plane of the motherboard, or are there any on a separate card? If there's a separate card, try using that
and let us know the results.
If not, just try one on the back anyway.
Edit: When you say external hard drive, are those eSATA drives or USB hard drives?!? If they're the latter, then I definitely want you to try mounting a USB key on the back of your system!
If the external hard drive is a USB drive, it's likely you have it plugged into the back, correct? If so, then it's probably on a separate controller. If you plug one of your flash drives in there, and you get no error, then it tells me even more that the
problem is the USB controller controlling the front USB ports!!!
Sorry to say, but if this works, then it's very likely that the front controller has a hardware problem!
One more question, are any of your USB ports USB 3.0?