Trouble with USB Device

[JPicasso]

Having trouble with a USB thumb drive.

This device worked in the past, on this laptop.
The trouble is, while Windows recognizes it, it is not assigned a drive letter under "My Computer".

The device is recognized correctly by Windows, and it DOES appear under USB decvices in device manager.
It is also correctly managed by the "safely remove hardware" icon. In fact, the Remove hardware app tells me that it is assigned to Drive "F". but it's not.

I've tried all USB ports. The laptop WILL work with an external Hard drive. That is assigned a letter, I can r/w to it, happy day.

This drive worked on my home computer yesterday, and this morning when I plug it into work laptop, it fails.

I've tried to refresh, and scan for hardware changes, no dice.

Stupid computers! Help.

[JPicasso]

Here is more info:

Decided to try and assign a drive letter via "Computer Management - Disk Manaement". It is already assigned drive F:.

The only difference I can see is the thumb drive is FAT, and my XHDD is NTFS.

Could that be the trouble?

[Nightwalker83]

I doubt the type of hard drive is going to be the cause of your problem since you said the usb drive worked on the same laptop before.

Did the drive come with any diagnostic software? If so try running that and seeing if the soft detects any problems. I had the same problem with my Western Digital hard drive except mine didn't work on neither of my computers.

[JPicasso]

The hard drive works fine. It's the thumb drive that stinks.
Both have worked on this laptop.

I just got an update from a colleague. Seems that thumb drives are frowned upon and blocked somewhere in the policy. IT Nazi alert.

Not sure what to do at this point.
Thanks.

[JuggaloBrotha]

Try re-formatting the thumb drive to Fat32, that's fixed my issues with flash drives before

[Siddharth Rout]

Just a thought

It seems like it is trying to share a drive letter with something else, like a virtual drive. It is something like this... Do you have a network drive mapped to it? If yes, try un-mapping the network drive and you might see the thumb drive in Windows Explorer.


One more possibility.

This is an especially common problem when you have networked drives.

Microsoft has a hotfix available that corrects this problem - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694
The hotfix makes USB drives take the next available drive letter instead of trying to incorrectly use the first drive even if it’s already in use.

[Lord Orwell]

if they have blocked usb drives in computer management, there is nothing you can do. I don't know why it would be blocked and the usb hard drive wouldn't be though. You can try changing the thumb drive to ntfs and see if that matters. Note that this is not straightforward in vista. You will have to run the convert.exe program as microsoft for some reason is against portable devices using that file format.

[Nightwalker83]

The hard drive works fine. It's the thumb drive that stinks.

Ah, I was thinking it was a usb (portable) hard drive! I have never had a thumb drive fail on me before.

[Lord Orwell]

Ah, I was thinking it was a usb (portable) hard drive! I have never had a thumb drive fail on me before.

really? I've owned three, and one lasted about a week and the latest one randomly quits working and has to be unplugged and plugged in again.

[Nightwalker83]

really? I've owned three, and one lasted about a week and the latest one randomly quits working and has to be unplugged and plugged in again.

Yeah, the thumb drives seem to last with me the portable hard drives on the other hard die. I had my portable hard drive for about 6 months before it died on me.

[Lord Orwell]

well thumb drives are flash memory so depending on your write cycles to them (example: readyboost) you will kill one sooner if not later.

[JPicasso]

It is an issue with computer management settings, I am almost certain now.

Strange part, is that I CAN access files through another program's open file dialog. and it maps to the place that disconnect device says it is.

Anyways, I got my files copied, and that's all I needed.

Thanks

[Siddharth Rout]

Did you check my previous post?

Also what Lord said in post 7 could be the reason. In My company, they have blocked the CD drive but I can still open it using Excel 97 open file dialog.