USB Drive not showing in Explorer

[teqmod]

Strange issue:

I have a XPpro laptop and when a USB flash drive or PCMcia flash drive are inserted the drive does not show up in explorer. The odd thing is there is no issue with a Maxtor USB Hard drive. The real weird thing is under DiskMgmt the drive is there and letter E: is assigned. If I go to a command prompt I can access the drive. If I just go to Start->run->e:\ I get an error. Now if I go to the Task mgr and end the explorer process and then restart it the drive shows up. I have checked the version of the explorer.exe file against another machine with the same patch level and there are no differences. I even copied over the explorer files from a known good machine and restarted the problem machine with no luck. To answer the question that I know will come up, yes there are mapped drives but none use the letter E: and I disconnected all the mapped drives and the problem still exists. Any other ideas on where to go from here?

 

[kjv1611]

Do you have SP1 and SP2 installed, as well as all other Windows updates on your machine?

 

[teqmod]

Running XP SP2 and it is up to date on all of the updates.

 

[sostek]

Had the very same problem recently with XP. Seems that the USB drive always wants to mount as E:. Our problem was that we already mapped E:. What we ended up doing was mapping the server drive to F: and letting the usb drive take E: when it wanted.

 

[teqmod]

We have that issue with some of our other machines and live with it but this is different. Nothing is mapped to e:\ and it shows up except in explorer. Ending the explorer process and starting it again makes the drive visible in explorer. I have modified the setting in XP so that it requires you to use the "safely remove hardware" deal.

 

[kjv1611]

Here is another idea: whatever drive you purchased, do you have a driver CD for it, or was it manufactured by a mainstream manufacturer, so that you can go to their website and download the most current drivers/software for it? Some drives and USB devices do not 100% correctly if you do not install the 3rd party drivers/software.

 

[teqmod]

Unfortunately it is not just a single drive with this problem. We have used several USB flash (jump) drives and a pcmcia flash drive with the same results. The Maxtor USB drives which are conventional IDE drives internally work fine.

I am not sure if the problem is because of the "memory" type drives or not but it seems that way thus far.

I willcheck a few manufacturers and see if I can find a driver for one of our devices and install it to see what happens.

 

[kjv1611]

Well, I just thought - duh (on my part).... I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier - and you may have already tried it.

I'd check the manufacturer's website for updated drivers/firmware, or see if you have a CD possibly with the drivers/software for everything. I know with my Dell Inspiron 1150, if I do not install the USB drivers from the install CD or from Dell's website, that the USB ports to not work correctly.