USB Flash Disk not appearing in Explorer

Alas, my flash drive (SanDisk Cruzer Mini 512MB) worked fine, and then one day it stopped showing up in My Computer, explorer, etc. Showed up in Device Manager, but not in the other two.

Though I can't provide a resolution to this problem for you guys (I tried all the suggestions), the one thing that will make it more convenient at least is to create a shortcut to the path of your removable drive. Like the others said, typing the actual drive letter into the address bar in My Computer will bring up your flash drive no problem, so just create a shortcut to that path.

ie. my path is R:\, so I created a shortcut going to R:\.

Good luck!

I have a slightly different problem...

My piece-of-excrement compaq laptop :dead: has a failed power connector. (The only thing that connects the power socket to the motherboard are the solder joints, and the force of plugging and unplugging the power breaks them over time. I seem to be lucky in that my laptop lasted 20 months. Virtually all pc laptops have this designed-to-break design, so if you have one, be aware that this is in your future.) Since the manufacturer's recommended repair is a $500 motherboard replacement (yeah, right...) I have migrated as much as I can to my ancient (but still working!) 1998 mac powerbook, and my windows development work to 2 desktops, one at work and one at home. And I pulled the 2.5-inch hard drive out of the worthless POE laptop :dead: and put it in an external USB2 enclosure, which I carry back and forth plugging into the desktops at home and at work.

This enclosure has a kind of funky usb connector. It has a y-shaped cable with TWO usb plugs that go into the computer. One of the 2 plugs has a back which is a female usb connector, and the cord comes out of the side of the connector, while the other one looks like a normal usb plug.

My problem is that I plug in the drive, and SOMETIMES it does not appear in "My Computer" and does not appear in the My Computer->Manage->Storage->Disk Management (the internal hard drive and the cd drive both appear.) But I DO get an icon to eject the disk on my taskbar, and if I go through the Add/Remove Hardware control panel it sees the device and claims that it is working properly. And it appears in the My Computer->Manage->Device Manager.

My "solution" has been to try repeatedly -- plug the drive in, if it doesn't appear, push the "Stop USB mass storage device" button, unplug it, move the cables around to different usb ports. (I have 4 usb ports on the backplane, although the cable coming out the side of one of the drive's 2 usb connectors makes some plug in permutations impossible.) Eventually it appears with a drive letter, but which arrangement of connectors and ports works and doesn't work is different every time.

If anyone has any intelligent ideas as to what is going on, I'd be happy to hear em. Til then, I'll file it under "things that make you go 'hmmm...'"

cathy

Use third party file, ExplorerXP to see USB drives

Hello all.... there is a file called "ExplorerXP" that can be found on the site, http://www.g4tv.com. This file (freeware) runs as an enhanced windows explorer and recognizes USB drives (such as the SanDisk drives) correctly. One can hotswap and this small utility (which looks like windows explorer) will recognize USB drives without the silly "portable media" assignment under the control panel that Windows XP does in windows explorer. When recognized like this, one does not have full access. Also, I think that drive letter assignment is not an issue as it seems to be with windows explorer in XP (especially with SP2 installed). Hope this helps....

How to make USB drives visible in Explorer

If you have mapped network drives and you plug in a USB pen drive, Explorer will map the drive over the first mapped network drive and not be able to access it.

A quick fix is to leave a gap in the drive letter sequence between local drives(e.g. a: to e: ) and mapped network drives (e.g. h: to m: leaving f: & G: free for USB drives)

An alternative if you dont want to move your mapped network drives is to map the USB drive to another letter. Plug the drive in and in Windows XP go to Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management(Local)>

If you can see your USB drive, right click on it in the lower pane and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." then Select "Change or Add". You should now be able to select your chosen drive letter from the drop down list. Click OK twice and exit Computer Management.

Unfortunately, every time you plug your pen drive you will have to go through this sequence again. :evil:

Regards,

Tim.

How do I get the drive letter to Stick

Hi I was looking for a solution like the one you mention here. I am using a Dell D600 laptop and a Dell c610 laptop with Windows XP, SP2. I tried assigning or changing the drive letter for one of my usb flash drives to "x", but but this does not stick with all of my usb flash drives. It will only return to the drive letter I assinged originally for that specific device. For any other device it tries to grab the next available drive letter. Does anyone know if there is a way to permanently assign a drive letter to a usb device? :rolleyes:

Explorer XP works Great!

I tried this for my Dell c610 and D600 laptops and it works great for viewing any USB flash drive I insert into my laptops. Thanks a lot :grinthumb !

USB mass storage not visible

hi,

my variant on the problem is that when I plug the mass storage device in it does come up under the device mananger, but NOT the disk manager or any where else.

so i cant format it or assign it a drive letter. I even tried partition magic, but it wont even start with the device pluged into the computer.

joseph

power may be an issue, I looked at the power info avail in the device manager and it is only drawing 10mA (while my wireless keyboard and mouse are drawing 100). since it is actually a HDD 10mA seems way to low.
thanks,
joseph

Problem Resolved:fixed My Usb Mobile Hard Drive!!!

After plugging in my usb hard drive into my brothers computer, it randomly went missing from windows explorer and then i plugged it back into my computer that i had used it on many times before and it was missing there too.

The Solution:
I downloaded a program called partition magic from http://www.soft32.com/download-Partition_Magic-151-5.html

[EDIT]: NB this is only the demo version so to use it you either need to buy the full version or if you're cheapskate, find a crack from somewhere. Then i discovered that my usb drive was displayed as hidden so i right clicked the drive and selected unhide and then apply. The system then rebooted and my drive was visible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi, i've also the problem (xp sp2) and i make this for the moment:
download a new manager files (AB Commander) ;
ctrl+alt+del and i closed the process explorer.exe;
and with ab commander now there is no problem...
Is a bug of explorer i think, but only with sp2 because with sp1 i have not problem.

ciao

New flash Drive problem ive never heard of.

:knock: ok, yesterday the computer i ws using my flash drive on crashed. The computer would not boot up for some time after the fact. Later I tried to use myy flash drive on another computer only to find that somehow it now looks like a disk drive. If I click on the explorer label I am told to insert a disk into the flash drive. It used to call the drive by its brand now it just says removable drive. I cannot format it with windows cause like a floppy drive there is no memory. So now I have a 2 gb flash drive with no memory and wants a disk inserted into it. Ive tried to format it under disk managment in the control panel but thats no good cause you dont get a format option on disk drives unless there is a data disk loaded into it. I would take it back but im kinda stuck, deployed to the middle a Bagdad right now. not to many Best Buys around here. :knock:

usb device not appearing in explorer but not only...

Hi to all,
I registered specifically to answer this post and maybe have a complete solution. As you certainly suppose, I encountred the same problem as you but not only...
When plugging in my usb devices, no letter appears in the explorer but a letter is assigned in the de disk manager. On top of this, when I want to map a network drive, I have the same problem. All is working fine if I access my usb device or network drive by entering the letter in the address bar though.

Now I think I have a partial solution... I recently had another problem concerning the I.E. "open in a new window" function. This was the result of an unregistration of some dlls from I.E. With some more researches I found that a fix existed for the network mapping problem. It could have been solved by the application of a specific patch concerning the shell32.dll on WXP and wshel32.dll on W2003 or the latest SP from microsoft. But all this is happening on my work machine. I only have limited admin rights and was not allowed to install specific applications other than the authorized ones.

The facts now... I then had the idea to unregister and reregister the concerned dll and to reboot. The commands are "regsvr32 /u shell32.dll" to unregister and "regsvr32 shell32.dll"... to reregister.

The effects are that when mapping a network drive or connecting a usb drive, it does not appear in the already opened explorer(s) but by starting new instances I now see the affected letters!!! No need for extra reboots!!! Hurrray!!!!

What I would like and I think that someone could help is to get the current opened explorers to be updated immediately like in the situation I knew before the problem.

I think that this could be related to dependencies concerning shell32.dll...

If someone finds the somution before me, please be so kind to advice...

Hoping this helps!
Thx in advance.

USB Drive not mapped in Explorer

Here is what happened to me.

Pluged in the USB drive - seemed to load fine. No apparent drive assigned in explorer. I Opened the 'remove drive' utility and selected the checkbox that shows the drive information - it showed that it was mapped to drive F:\ which was already mapped to a network drive on my system. Sure enough - it over-rode the network drive mapping - using that drive in explorer wrote to the USB device.

If I remove the USB drive, remap the network drive to a letter other than F:\ and rebooted, at that point the USB drive did show up in explorer as drive F:\.

I suspect the USB driver is searching the list of installed local drives (physical drives?) and picking the next available drive letter without any concern about network mappings.

USB drive works fine in Win2000, problem appears only in XP as far as I can tell.

For what it is worth I have always had success with the following way of dealing with the various USB drives I own/owned. (WIN2K,XP)

When first installed, windows puts these drives next to or in the midst of your current Drive arrangement (between C:\ and whatever the last drive is E,F etc.) The default is to pack them together, usually conflicting with the existing CDrom's(thus no drive letter listing immediately in Explorer)

In Disk Manager, I place the CDrom's near the end of the alphabet R:\ and higher.
Then change newly installed Usb's etc in the middle L:\ - P:\
After a change and reboot I have not had any issues with them.

new solution(hoped work)

Hi everybody,
I'm new in this forum, I know the topic mybe has expired, but I hope my information still able to help someone there.
Like all of You, I also facing the same problem with my usb drive.
After a painfull search of solution(including this forum) I finally found some great solution.
It seems that the problrm occured after I install daemon tool 4.03 which automatically install secdrv.sys, sptd.sys ans sptdXXXX.sys (XXX is a number) to c:\windows\system32\drivers.
So what I do is just delete these three files, and reboot system, and then
HORRRRAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY..............my usb drive works just fine again.
Hope this can help

Frankly, thank U 4 ol.

USB HardDisk Works But Does NOT Appear in Explorer!

Ok, here is my problem...

I have a WesternDigital 200GB IDE (divided in two NTFS partitions) in a USB enclosure.

It works fine on other PCs, but when i plug it on my laptop (Vaio OS:XP-MCE),
i hear the "usb plug sound", but nothing is shown in the explorer.

I Go to Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Managenent and
voila! the disk is shown there but has no letter assigned, so i assign a letter for it. Then I Open the Explorer again but Still nothing there!!!
I try to access the disk through the Disk Management and i Have access ONLY from there!!! Still nothing in the explorer.

When i disconect and reconnect the USB Disk, i check again the Disk Management and the Disk Appears there but again with no assigned Letters!!
(i.e. the previous letter assignment i made before re-plug-in, are lost!!!)

Also, when i Try the Option: "Mount Disk in an Empty NTFS Folder", i always get the error message : "The path cannot be used for creating a drive path likely because the folder does not exist or is already a drive path to some other Volume." (nomatter where the empty forder might be).

At least i can have access on the Disk but with the hard way i just described (only through Disk Management), and i have to do the same procedure (letter assignment) each time i reconnect it to my laptop.

Any Help Tips are Wellcome, Thanks!