My Dell Precision 3561 connects to a TBT-UDZ at home. I separately connected a M3 Macbook Air and a USB external hard drive to backup iCloud photos to the external hard drive. This worked, but upon ejecting the hard drive in macOS and disconnecting the Macbook Air, I forgot to also disconnect the hard drive from the TBT-UBZ. When I next connected by Precision 3561 to the TBT-UDZ, the hard drive was still connected and it was adopted by Windows and also by my Citrix File Explorer app. Upon realizing my mistake, I attempted to eject from both environments and then disconnected and removed the hard drive. Here is what I observe:
At home with my Precision 3561 connected to the TBT-UDZ, I do NOT see the hard drive listed as a drive in the local version of File Explorer in Windows 11
At home with my Precision 3561 connected to the TBT-UDZ, I see the hard drive listed as a drive in the Citrix File Explorer app
At work, with my Precision 3561 connected to a different dock, I do NOT see the hard drive listed as a drive in the Citrix File Explorer app
I want to eliminate the ghost drive that shows in #2 above. Because #3 is true, we’ve proven that the issue is not tied to Citrix. It is tied to the TBT-UDZ hardware.
We attempted a reset by doing the following
disconnect everything from the TBT-UDZ including the thunderbolt USB-C cable and the power cable.
Thank you for contacting Plugable support! Sorry to hear about this issue. I’d be more than happy to assist you.
Please note that the TBT3-UDZ dock itself has no “memory” of previously attached devices, so if the hard drive is still being detected but is no longer connected to the dock at home, then the system itself is in some way remembering it.
Based on the behavior that you’re encountering and the troubleshooting steps you have mentioned, I am curious if you also rebooted the laptop as well when you disconnected/reconnected the dock and devices? If the system was not rebooted then it’s possible that is why the drive is still detected when the dock is connected to the system.
I would recommend to try resetting the dock again and rebooting the system in this specific order:
Fully unplug the dock from all devices, power, and Thunderbolt 3 cable to the host computer. Reboot your computer and after logging back in wait about 30-60 seconds, then reconnect the power cable to the dock first, Thunderbolt 3 host cable next, and USB/all other devices last.
If that has still not helped please let me know.
Thanks again for contacting Plugable support and best wishes!
Thank you for your response. I tried resetting the dock again and rebooting the system in the specific order that you mentioned and I am still having the issue.
Thank you for trying that, I am sorry it has not helped.
My apologies in advance as I am not familiar with the Citrix File Explorer app, I have a few quick questions:
When you see this drive showing up in Citrix while the dock is connected (but while the drive is physically disconnected), does the drive show up as just the drive letter (like “(D:)” drive, for example), and/or does it show the external hard drive name/label (for example maybe it’s called “Backup”, etc)?
Does Citrix give you any option to eject or remove the drive from the list of drives?
Could it be possible that Citrix is seeing a different drive? For example, the TBT3-UDZ has an internal card reader for MicroSD and SD cards, some applications will show the card reader slots as additional drives even if no memory card is inserted into the dock.
