Pen drives not working

[mrbios]

What are the potential causes of pen drives not detecting on student machines?

the strange bit is some types work and others dont, do certain pen drives use different drivers that policys may be stopping from installing? if so which policys would i be required to change?

this issue is only found in 3 new IT rooms we've recently fitted out, 2 older rooms appear to be working fine

Cheers

[Halfmad]

I've never had any issues like this, wish I did as pupils bring all sorts in on their drives.

Have you had a look at the USB drivers the computers are using? might be worth while getting updates rather than using the MS supplied ones.

[witch]

Are you sure they aren't being detected? Or is it the case that they are choosing a drive that is already allocated and therefore you can't see them?

[iatkinson]

We tend to find if the usb drive is windows certified then there's no problem, if its a cheaper drive and requires drivers then won't work as students can't access c:, ditto with U3.

[Geoff]

I had a similar problem with a couple of usb pen drives not working for a teacher. When plugged into a windows PC is just came up with a 'drive not found error'. However I plugged them into my Linux desktop PC and it could detect and see the files on them fine. So I backed them up and formatted them. After this they were usable in windows again.

[tmcd35]

How do you manage drive mappings, etc? We expect pen drives to be mapped on either drive D or drive E here, depending on if a CD-Rom is present.

We've noticed that some Pen drives have a 'emulated CD-Rom' Rom containing auto run software to access the main drive (I think the U3 drives do this).

We map drive F: for apps on one of the servers.

So If a computer has a CD drive and the Pen drive has this boot rom, then Windows (for some reason) tries to assign it to drive F which is already taken as a network drive - the pen drives, thus don't work.

Also, we have stopped EXE's running from drives D and E so if a pen drive is encrypted - it won't work either.

Are you sure your not having similar problems with the pen sticks, or is it all pen drives?

[Geoff]

You might want to use USBDLM for controlling the drive mapping.

[mrbios]

the pen drives always map to E: on our system, all IT rooms are setup exactly the same (apart from the change in hardware between the 2 old rooms and the 3 new rooms - and thus the different drivers motherboards will use for USB)

so shouldnt be a problem with trying to map to a letter thats in use

one of the drives we've tested is a brand new drive, so no encryption, no files in it at all

iatkinson - cheap non-windows certified sounds like the most likely cause at the moment, but that said they work in the 2 older rooms ok

[kerrymoralee9280]

Personally I wouldn't have F: mapped as a network drive.

The lowest letter I have is H: for home directories - after that the next letter starts at M:

Don't know if this could cause problems - never wanted to try it to find out hehe

[tmcd35]

Having F: mapped as a apps drive is a legacy thing here. While we still use WinSuite, it's a bit too much hassle to change it!

Anywho, back to the op... If the drives are always mapped to drive E: - are you positive the effected drived contain no boot rom? We had similar problem here with kids bringing in new pen drives. The boot rom would map itself to drive E: and the actual pen drive would then take drive F: (doubly disastrous in our case!). Have you double checked drive F: to see if the effected pen drives are mapped there?

Terry.

[ZeroHour]

Double check the device has been added in device manager (you can do this remotely while your test account is logged in)
We have a issue where putting a usb stick in after logon does not create the drive letter in My Computer, that is assuming windows has the driver which usually it does.
We get all users to put the stick on before they logon and it seems to be fine.

[comedydave]

It could be taking one of your network drive letters, we having this problem on staff laptops where the pen drives were taking R: for some reason

[ChrisP]

1) enable lagacy support in bios

2) also if you are still having problems and it's not the drive letter:
try uninstalling the USB ROOT HUB in devices restart and then the drivers will be re-installed.

[contink]

Remember something like this happening where lots of different pen drives had been used and it we ended up with a stack overflow somewhere noted in the system? event log.

Solution was to up the stack mentioned or remove the plethora of drivers for the vast array of sticks that'd been used to that point.

May not solve your particular problem but I think that was what happened with us.

[maniac]

the USB drive letter software mentioned above will most probably sort this for you, simelar problems here on some machines, but no problems since installing it.

Incidently the drive letter we use is B:\ as it is garunteed to be free on every machine, unless you have 2 floppy drives of course, but how many machines even have 1 floppy drive these days??

Mike.