One of our members of staff has a USB Pen Drive which he uses.
This morning, he comes into work, plug the USB Pen Drive into his laptop and it doesn't show in "Computer". I've been down and had a look, and the laptop picks it up as a device, in that if you go to the remove hardware, there is a "Mass Storage Device Present".
I've checked in Device Manager, and the USB Device is also present there, however it is appearing as disabled. Right click the device, and the option to Enable doesn't appear, the only choice is to Disable it. So I've disabled it, and then you get the option to enable it, but once you select enable it still appears as disabled. Go into the properties of the device and the only information you get is that the device is disabled.
So, I decided to do the obvious thing, and tested the USB pen drive in another machine - where it works perfectly well.
So, I did the next obvious thing and tested a different USB Pen Drive in the original machine - the new pen drive worked perfectly well.
So I'm now a bit stuck.....clearly the fault must be with the laptop not the pen drive, but I don't know what else to try.
i was going to say, look for it on disk management after it is plugged in. That's a common problem with us. It is registered by system just not assigned a drive letter, perhaps because the one it wants from the last PC it was in being used by another device / CD-ROM drive.
the only bit that is throwing me is that it says 'disabled'. worth a look on disk management though.
Assuming the machine is on the domain, a PC / laptop can also assign the USB Pen Drive a letter which is also assigned to a network drive (depending what you assign the network drives as). I have always found that the network drive takes priority.
As other said, disk management and assign a new letter if thats the problem
yes but can you also see a bar for the usb drive. probably FAT partition.
right click on it and assign drive letter.
this may make it visible in My Computer...
On the machine that's playing up, take a look in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\U SBSTOR - you'll see a list of keys for different USB storage devices which have been plugged in. If you can recognise the particular key for the USB pen then delete that key. This should force a hardware redection when it's next plugged in.
If you're not sure which key it is (eg mine is showing things like "usb_disk_2" as well as more recognisable names) you can safely delete all the keys - they get recreated if you plug the USB pens etc back in.
Alternatively, the attached program provides an easy way to view all the USB devices that have been attached to the system, find the one that represents that pendrive, (or just go for all Mass Storage Devices) uninstall it and then plug the device in again and let it reinstall itself.
~It does the same thing as srochford suggests, I just find it easier to use
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