Strange USB Problem with Vista :(

linktoinsanity · 11 Sep 2009 at 11:07

Hi all, I have my boss' wife's laptop as it has been having trouble detecting USB Thumb drives. So I've plugged in both the one that they've been trying and it doesn't detect. The windows sound works indicating that it's detected something but you cannot access the drive. I have tried checking disk management and the drive doesn't even show up in that.

The same thumb drive works on my own laptop and numerous other ones do not pick up, whilst they work fine on other computers.

It also picks up USB hard drives fine and the problems lie with all the USB ports.

It's running Vista Home Basic (with Aero running oddly enough, I always thought basic omitted Aero?) and as far as I know mostly the same factory settings as when it came from DELL in th first place. It is an Inspiron 1545.

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

stoofa · 11 Sep 2009 at 11:20

OK - there is one situation where I have seen this happen.

Are there any free drive letters between the final local drive and any remote/network drives?
So for example:

A - Floppy
C - HD1
D - HD2
E - DVD
F- Network Map
G- Local NAS Map

If there is - move the network drives up by one.
You need a free drive letter between the local and network drives - as the USB device cannot be allocated a drive letter after network drives.

linktoinsanity · 11 Sep 2009 at 11:33

stoofa said:
OK - there is one situation where I have seen this happen.

Are there any free drive letters between the final local drive and any remote/network drives?
So for example:

A - Floppy
C - HD1
D - HD2
E - DVD
F- Network Map
G- Local NAS Map

If there is - move the network drives up by one.
You need a free drive letter between the local and network drives - as the USB device cannot be allocated a drive letter after network drives.

Ah cool. I shall definately try that. Thank you stoofa. Only problem is that I'm not sure if there are any network drives set up on it.

It does seem to keep bringing up Flash drives as Realtech USB2.0 Card Readers however, so I'm trying installing SP2 atm to see if it overwrites the wrong driver on there with the correct one.

linktoinsanity · 11 Sep 2009 at 13:14

Fixed. It turned out to be a previosuly installed driver had corrupted the installation of new devices. Fixed by removing the hidden devices from device manager.

bledd · 11 Sep 2009 at 13:36

was going to suggest, given this situation, I'd load up a slax disc

http://www.slax.org/

it's ~200mb, so even works on pretty old hardware, a live linux disc

if the usb didn't work in that, then I'd say the ports were broken