computer not recognizing USB drives

I have a computer that does not recognize the USB drives that I put into the USB ports.

There is only one data stick that it recognizes but does not recognize the data stick that transfers pictures from my phone to the computer or my WD My Book External HD. When I plug either into the USB port, the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon appears in the system tray but when I double click it to bring up the list of removable hardware, it only describes the connected drive as a "USB Mass Storage Device" whereas other computers would recognize it as "My Book External HD" or "Geek Squad G3 drive" for instance.

Does anyone know why my computer chooses not to recognize these drives and how to fix it?

OK, so I looked in my device manager and the computer apparently is recognizing the drive but it's not appearing in "My Computer" so I don't know how to access it...

What is the brand and model of your computer or motherboard, and your source of your operating syste, as well as Service Pack. We see this problem usually on systems with a USB 2.0 drive and a USB 1.1 system... and also in hubs. Do you have an "add-on" usb pci card? We also see the problem on some "recovery" type Windows XP systems... but most frequently on earlier versions of Windows.

I believe I may have determined the problem...

The computer on which I am working is a computer at my office. There are no network restrictions for external HD's but there is a server in the office that is partitioned into multiple sub-folders or sub-drives (I don't know the techincal term). There is one partition that is given the drive letter G: (e.g. G:/Projects) and the WD My Book is trying to claim the name G: also. Is there a way to change the name that the WD external HD is trying to claim?

Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Management -> Computer Management -> Disk Management to change the drive letters, etc.

Your server support person should backup the data in G: and then rename it to P: (for projects).

got the problem fixed...I didn't know about using the administrative tools as described above...

thanks for the help and the network administrator should probably free up the low letters for small USB drives