Serious issue: Brave downloads cause secondary drive to disappear

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Every time I download anything to my D: drive the drive disappears. This happens every time but when I use Chrome or Firefox there is no problem. If I download to a Ramdisk with Brave then there is no problem. But some downloads are too big for the Ramdisk.

I’ve down extensive full file scanning with Avast antivirus of brave and system files. No virus is found. I’ve run diagnostics on the hard drive and it is in good health with no problems found. When I reboot the drive comes back okay but one recent reboot got stuck at the Windows logo. This is on Windows 7 and I realize it is not fully supported now by Brave. But it is a warning for others here too that something is very wrong. Computer/Network tech for over 20 years. I certainly don’t know everything but this issue with only Brave seems to only be a Brave issue.

I used a diagnostic tool that indicated Brave is using \srvsvc in a way to access the D: drive and it reported this: “An attempt to write to a protected registry area has been detected. Key Path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RUN”
Is that normal for Brave?
I’m continuing testing and diagnostics to get more info. The downloads all seem to fail in the last second and leave behind a filename.crdownload which is not easily deleted. I had to use Fedora Linux to delete it sometimes. I’ve not seen this problem when running Windows 10 on this same computer. But I prefer Win 7 and have hundreds of programs there so I won’t use Win 10 except when needed.

My D: drive is a Hitachi 4 terabyte drive and still has a lot of free space (350+ gigabytes free). The size of the download does not seem to have any effect on this issue - whether it is 1 megabyte or 500 megabytes the drive still disappears. Oddly when I download a file with Brave to another drive in the system (H: drive) it was okay one time but the next download to the H: drive resulted in the D: drive disappearing again. So far this problem does not seem to happen with external USB drives but having the D: drive disappear when downloading to another internal drive is odd. The Brave browser and Appdata are on my C: drive. Not trying to pin this on the Brave browser - just trying to understand how to fix it as I really like the Brave browser over anything else out there. More info to follow soon.

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Another detail - when I say the D: drive disappears I mean it cannot even be seen with a partition program. I’ve used several including Aomei Pro version and it sees all my drives except for the D: drive. Totally MIA… What can do this?

I’ve done more downloads to the D: drive with Firefox and everything stays good. D: drive still there which would seem to eliminate any hard drive or cable problems. I also downloaded a nightly version of Brave and installed it to another location. When I used this nightly version of Brave it also made the D: drive disappear. Wow! That was very unexpected. That’s a totally fresh version of Brave and it still causes this problem. Could there be a virus that is Anti Brave? Google?

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More unexplainables : I booted Windows 10 in this same system and tried downloading a file with the Windows 10 version of Brave. It seemed the D: drive had disappeared again for a half a minute but eventually came back. However the download would not finish with Brave. Before trying this I scanned the Windows 7 C: drive with the Windows 10 anti-virus including the Brave folders but nothing was found. This tends to rule out any boot time viruses that might be on Windows 7.

More anomalies as it seems to get even stranger. On Windows 10 I tried Chrome to download a 425 Mb iso file (Linux) to my D: drive. It failed when it got to what appeared to be the end (full size file) leaving an ‘Unconfirmed.crdownload’ file. It did this twice and would not finish. For several minutes the hard drive continued to make noise that it does during a download. I closed the browser and tried to restart Windows 10 but it said some program was stopping it from restarting. I waited a couple minutes of seeing hard drive activity before hitting the reset button. Upon restart there were the two unconfirmed files. I renamed one with a .iso extension and it opened okay with WinIso. Both of these were the exact same number of bytes and both seemed okay. Will be trying with Firefox next.

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Try Changing the Drive Letter
Perform a Restart and Test again

Check Drive Status in Crystaldiskinfo.

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