Dear friends, this is happening on two different computers both running sp2 on win XP - systems are P4 3.2 1 gig ram and lateset radeon 9800 cards.

I'm using one of those USB internal drives - you know the ones that allow you to use up to 5 different types of flash cards - including SD, MMC, SMARTSTICK, CF , etc.

The drives are internally installed (in a standard drive bay) and cables take it directly to the mainboard (in this case an ABIT IC7 motherboard) to hook to headers for USB2.0 support.

I have had little trouble making these things work - except on occassion suddenly windows will STOP recognizing the very existance of the drive!

I have solved this problem before on one of the computers which has easy access to the cable, by simply unplugging the USB cable while windows desktop is in view, and then plugging it back in. Windows then recognizes it, and it functions fine once again.

Unfortunately the other computer is 30 minute job (literally) to unscrew and access those cables. I'm tyring to figure out how to solve this a different way if possible.

Why does windows stop recognizing my USB peripheral, and why does it seem to "reset" when I un-plug and then re-plug in the cable to the USB port?

And why does it disappear at all? Is there a way to fix this via windows instead of manually having to unplug the device each time?

If the problems is windows, I might as well throw these flash drives away because I cannot be tearing my computer apart each time that windows gets fickle and decides it doesn't want to recognize the drive any longer.

I hope I'm making sense -- any advice is greatly appreciated -
and by the way, rebooting the computer doesn't solve the issue -- I've tried several times.


sincerely,
daniel

I just figured out the problem.

Since the flash drive is wired to the headers on the main board, simply shutting down the computer is not enough -- power is still being fed to the flash drive (even when the computer is seemingly sound asleep.)

I unplugged the source of power, and waited a couple of minutes - to make sure that the motherboard was getting ZERO juice, and then plugged it back in, and rebooted.

Windows XP now recognizes the drive - and I don't have to tear apart my computer each time to unplug internal USB connection cable to the motherboard headers!

Sweet!


thank you everyone!

daniel

Thank you very very much!! that was driving me insane!!! (no pun intended)