Unable to see flash drive letter in My Computer

[Frank4d]

I have seen this behavior on multiple XP computers at work and at home, and with several flash drives. Sometimes there is no drive letter shown in My Computer or Windows Explorer. Other times there is (same computers, same flash drives).

I have noticed if I open a command window and type F: <Enter>, I can access it. Likewise, I can open Internet Explorer and type F: in the address bar and hit <Enter>, and access it there.

Does anyone know if there is a fix for this behavior?

 

[bcastner]

When a removable drive (USB flash drive, flash card reader, portable hard drive) is attached for the first time, Windows mounts it to the first available drive letter. If there is a network share on this letter, Windows will use it anyway for the new USB drive because network shares are specific to the current user and not visible in the context of the system where the letter is assigned. The USB drive then appears to be invisible.
You can change the letter assignments in the Windows Disk Management Console with a lot of mouse clicks but you have to do it again for every new device.

FIX: USB Drive Letter Manager

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

 

[Frank4d]

At work all machines are logged onto a domain and a logon script maps all network shares starting with H. On the machines I have seen with this problem there is at least one empty drive letter between the last physical drive and drive H, so there is no overlap.

The problem also occurs if users logon to "This machine". In that case there are no network shares or mapped drives.

I will give USBDLM a try though. I have searched the MS KB and Google and cannot find a fix that doesn't point to some problem I know my computers don't have. Except about 99% of "can't see USB flash drives in My Computer" happen on PCs at my work... so that is a clue.