USB Drives not showing up in My Computer/Explorer

[racketboy]

I have a SanDisk USB Keychain drive and a laptop hard drive in a generic USB enclosure.

I'm running XP Pro SP1.

The last few months neither drive will show up in My Computer or Explorer when plugged in. Refreshing doesn't help.

Some of them will bring up the autostart menu when it's plugged in, but not always (especially if the drive is empty). Even when this happens, it won't show up in MC/Explorer.

I can type in the letter for the drive in Explorer and I can access the contents. I can also got to Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage and see them in there too.

I can see the drives when I try to save files to them in applications

But this is very inconvenient and I'm hoping someone here can help me out.

 

[mtxblau]

You could boot into safe mode as admin (w/ GUI) and delete any multiple copies of USB storage that exist in the hardware profile. If you're plugging it in/taking it out often, that could be it (works for me with other USB devices).

 

[racketboy]

Originally posted by MTXBlau@Jan 28, 2004 @ 09:12 PM

You could boot into safe mode as admin (w/ GUI) and delete any multiple copies of USB storage that exist in the hardware profile. If you're plugging it in/taking it out often, that could be it (works for me with other USB devices).

hmm -- I'll give that a try tonight

just curious, why safe mode?

 

[gameboy900]

Safe mode doesn't load anything that isn't needed. Hence it prevents a majority of hardware and software conflicts from occuring and lets you restore/delete stuff easily. Also get TweakUI from MS and using it check that the drive letters haven't been hidden. In windows you can specify which drive letters are visible or not. For some reason the USB drives might be taking drive letters that had the hidden flag set on them.