USB storage showing up in 'Drive Management' but not in 'My Computer'...

peanutismint · 7 May 2006 at 13:18

Ok, let me begin by saying I don't know if this is in the correct forum as I don't really know where the problem lies, but I imagine it'd be with Windows. I'm running XP Pro btw.

SO, for the past few weeks, whenever I've connected any form of data storage device to my computer (via USB), it has failed to show up in 'My Computer' as an external drive or 'mass storage device' with its own drive letter like it used to. We're talking stuff like compact flash cards in an external USB card reader, my HiMD minidisc unit and a memory stick in my PSP. If i check in 'Disk Management', the drives usually show up, but I can't access them unless I assign them a drive letter, and it won't let me assign a drive letter without rebooting. After a reboot, whatever I had connected still doesn't show up in My Computer, but i can then access it through Disk Management, right-clicking on the drive and then clicking 'open'.
The problem compunds in that if anything that's not disk management wants to access my external peripherals, such as my PSP media program or my minidisc media program, they can't see the drive as it's not in My Computer.

Does anyone have any idea why my computer might have stopped automatically assigning drive letters to external things as they're connected?

peanutismint · 8 May 2006 at 01:11

yea i do have two threads, wasn't really sure if i'd put the first one in the right forum, sorry!

Right, I do have SP2, and the problem has only happened recently, although i'm at a loss as to what might have caused it. The format of the disks shouldn't be the problem, as I can gain access to them through disk management, and they're all simple enough file structures, mainly FAT.

G: and F: are my optical drives. I've tried re-lettering the usb drives (when they've finally been accessible) to random letters like X: and Y:, but no luck. I know the PSP used to come up with H, I or J depending on what virtual drives i had activated, and it seemed fine with assigning itself an available drive letter. I could try assigning all my hard/optical drives to high-alphabet letters (like Z Y X) and see if the USB drives find it easier to assign themselves that way, but I don't think it'd make any difference.

peanutismint · 8 May 2006 at 13:25

Have made a little picture to further emphasize my problem:

(Click to enlarge)

(p.s. if i'm violating rules by having this in two posts, let me know? Or just delete one!

Cheers.)

peanutismint · 8 May 2006 at 19:01

I have tried reinstalling the chipset drivers, just the other day; i thought it might be something with the USB2 drivers that it came with, but it did nothing. I'll try this TweakUI program. So it's on the Msoft site you say?

peanutismint · 11 May 2006 at 15:27

You deleted your profile? you mean like your windows user account? And you say this fixed the problem?

peanutismint · 11 May 2006 at 15:57

PROBLEM SOLVED!!

After Googling the error message ''partition or volume is not enabled" that Drive Manager gave when trying to assign drive letters, I came across a user who'd had exactly the same problem and found out that it was DaemenTools, the popular image mounting software, that had installed some drivers that were stopping the system from assigning drive letters and mounting drives. IT turned out that removing a "dtscsi.sys" driver and also sptd*.sys files in 'WINDOWS\System32\Drivers' and then rebooting solved the problem. About bloody time, too. Cheers for the help guys, let anyone else who posts with this problem know!