A signature collision is a rare but frustrating issue. The signature collision error will generally happen when you plug in two external hard drives or USB drives etc. We have seen the error when using two of the exact same drive. One of the drives will function, but both will not function at the same time and the error reports a “signature collision”.
How to fix signature collsion errors
Luckily, this type of error is very simple to fix. It took us a long time to figure it out, but it is extremely straightforward and you can fix the problem in less than a minute.
Click Start -> Control Panel
Open Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, then click on Disk Management within the computer management window.
When you click on disk management you will see a listing of all the drives under the right hand information column. The screenshot above shows the drive info in the right hand side, the drive partition information will be displayed under that.
Locate the drive with the error, it will say “offline”. Right-click on the drive name and select “online”. This will fix the signature collision error and your drives will now function.
