USB Flash drive problems

[wviperw]

I recently bought a Kingston 128mb USB Flash drive (woot!), but it doesn't seem to be working on my laptop. I've got Windows XP on there, so it *should* just plug and play. Instead, what happens is a little icon pops up in the systray notifying me that I can remove the attached USB hardware at any time. However, no removable drives pop up under My Computer or Explorer, whatsoever. So it is like it recognizes that the USB flash drive is plugged in, but it doesn't actually create the removable drive letter for it.

Anybody know what is up?

 

[Dallascisco]

First, I would try it in another machine to see if the symptoms persist. If they do you may have a bum drive but if they don't you may have a drive letter conflict. If you right click "my computer" and select manage you'll open a MMC session and on of your choices in the left hand pane will be disk management, slect that and see if your flash drive shows up in the list. From there you can reassign drive letters and whatnot.

 

[Dahak]

i know most are preformatted but what you could check is in device manager (Right click my computer -> properties -> hardware tab) and make sure there is not yellow ! on the device. if not go to disk management (right click my comptuer -> manage -> storage -> disk management. and if you see an unformatted 128mb drive, just format it to fat and that should be all

 

[mindblogg]

What OS do you have on your machine? Have you updated SP1 for your XP.
Try it on a different computer.

 

[wviperw]

Thanks guys.

It looks like the problem was that it was trying to map the USB flash drive to the E:, when the E: was already set as a network drive. For some reason Windows XP wasn't notifying me of this at all. Ahh well, it is working now.

 

[Dallascisco]

cool beans

 

[ampiere]

Ya I also had this problem before, WinXP is crazy, it only check drive letter for local storage device but not network path.

By the way, does anybody know whether USB drive can be used to boot into dos? My floppy drive is not working anymore and I am not going to buy a new one coz I only need it when I want to update my firmware. I'm using kingston date traveller 256mb usb2.0.