Help! Control Panel Not Recognising USB Flash Drive and no plug and play

Belly · 17 May 2009 at 17:58

Can someone please help me?

The Control Panel in My computer will not recognise any USB Flash Drives.

When I plug the devise in any available USB ports it shows up in the system tray under “Safely Remove Hardware” at G Drive indicating that Windows has recognised it. However, the G Drive does not appear in the Control Panel and as such I am unable to access it.

I tried the same devise on my laptop and it loaded correctly, ie the Plug and Play wizard appeared asking me what I wanted to do. The Plug and Play wizard did not appear on my main computer.

I’ve tried leaving the USB devise in the computer and rebooting, that hasn’t worked either. The flash drives have worked previously. One a crucial gizmo with a secure partition started playing up some time ago and I removed the secure partition, thereafter no part of the drive can be recognised.

Devise Manager states that the devise is working correctly too. It probably is but I can’t access it.

Edit: Forgot to say that both my computers are running on Windows XP

Greenlizard0 · 17 May 2009 at 18:30

Do you have to format it?

Belly · 17 May 2009 at 18:41

No, it's just a 64 mb flash drive which works on my laptop and my wife's computer

Belly · 17 May 2009 at 19:12

I think I might have cracked it but I don't know why. I found this info on another sight:

1. Start
2. Control Panel
3. Administrative Tools
4. Computer Management
5. Click Disk Management in left pane
6. Find the volume that has the disk space that is the size of your usb (determine which volume is your usb)
7. Right click on the volume and choose "Change drive letter or path"
8. Assign a new drive letter (such as z

but ensure that the drive letter is not in use
9. The thumb drive should now KEEP the same drive letter on reboot etc.

Back to me: I'ts strange that the drive letter was shown as "G", I changed it to "U" and up popped a small Windows Box asking me if I wanted to do the same action each time (although there was no substance in the box). I ticked it and now the drive is recognised. I just hope it works in the future. The wife had brought home some work which she needed printing off for a conference she's giving tomorrow and I had to do a lot of cable management etc to put my old laptop to use.

Thanx for your initial interest