Dec

28

USB Flash Drive Letter Problem

Posted by admin

December 28, 2006 |

Windows XP has some strange effects on USB flash drives. I had a friend who had been using his USB drive for a long time. Then one day his USB drive wouldn’t appear on his Windows XP desktop. Nothing had changed, as far as he could tell. The computer would see the drive when he plugged it in, but then it would go blank. When he tried to find it in “My Computer,” it wouldn’t appear.

I found that kind of bizarre, so I decided to check it out. The first thing that I did was go to disk management. You can go there by doing this:

Right clicking on “My Computer” goto “Manage” –> “Storage” –> “Disk Management”

Now, I saw his drive.  For some reason it seemed like the mapping to the drive letter was getting screwed up.  Then it dawned on me.  Maybe he had mapped a drive.  So, I checked out his mapped drives and found a low letter one.  I think it was E: .  I removed the mapped drive, removed the USB drive, and plugged it back in.  Voila, now XP saw the drive and assigned it E: .  So, the moral of the story is that it seems like XP wants to assign the USB the next drive letter after physical drives.  The problem is that you may have a mapped drive on that letter.  If you remove the mapped drive and remap it at a higher letter like Z:, then it should take care of the issue.


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