Automatically Troubleshoot The Semaphore Timeout Period Has Expired

What's the 'semaphore timeout period has expired' error?

The 'semaphore timeout period has expired' error can happen in many situations in Windows 10, 8 or 7. 

One, you're attempting to open a portable drive, for example, an external USB hard drive that is correctly connected to a computer, the access failed due to the error:

"Drive is not accessible, the semaphore timeout period has expired."

Two, when you're trying to transfer or copy large files over a network, you got the full error message as:

"Error 0x80070079: The semaphore timeout period has expired"

Automatically troubleshooting for semaphore timeout period has expired on external USB hard drive

The bad news is that there is no proven way yet to fix such a fatal error because it's very likely that the hard drive has been severely damaged. Still, you can make efforts to rescue data there. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is able to recover data from an inaccessible hard drive that reports all kinds of error, including the 'semaphore timeout period has expired', 'invalid raw file system', 'hard drive needs formatting' and so on before you can use it.

Fix 1. Recover data from hard drive "the semaphore timeout period has expired"

Download EaseUS hard drive recovery software, install it on your PC and launch it. Make sure that it has detected the hard drive in question.

Step 1. Select the external USB hard drive that sends error and click Scan.
Step 2. Run quick scan and deep scan to find all inaccessible data on the drive.
Step 3. Select all desired data files and click Recover.

Fix 2. Find and repair errors on hard drive with "the semaphore timeout period has expired"

If unknown errors and corrupted file system are the main cause of a damaged hard drive, try to fix this issue with EaseUS free partition manager called EaseUS Partition Master.

Step 1. Right-click on the hard drive and select Check partition.

Step 2. Choose the way that you want to use to check and repair remaining errors: "Check Partition Properties", "Call Windows Chkdsk" or "Surface Test" and Click OK to continue.

Step 3. Let the software automatically check and repair the found errors. And finally, click OK to finish the process.

Manual troubleshooting for semaphore timeout period has expired 0x80070079

For the other situations, the causes of 'semaphore timeout period has expired with an error code 0x80070079'  vary. It may be that Windows does not retry the network connection, so it times out, or perhaps the file system Windows is currently using is FAT32, which limits the file transfer for large files.

So, we suggested you do it yourself by following these steps to remove the error.

Step 1. Update drivers of network adapters

Step 2. Disable Firewalls and anti-virus software

Step 3. Do a clean boot

Step 4. Convert FAT32 to NTFS file system