New USB drive not available in Explorer

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G

Guest

I'm using WinXP Home, SP2, and have a USB memory stick and a USB external
drive. either will show in device manager, but neither will display in
Explorer. I've checked
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297694 and that info
does not work, as I have no network drives. I followed those instructions to
no avail. Any ideas on how to get a USB drive to show in Explorer with other
techniques will be appreciated, as I want to use the USB drive for backup.
thanks.
david
 
Drives will not show in Explorer unless they are partitioned and formatted
ans assigned a unique drive letter.

Use the XP disk management tool to view the disks. If the USB disk appear
as "RAW" or "UNALLOCATED", then you need to partition/format, using the disk
managment tool.

If the USB drive is already formatted (FAT32 or NTFS for XP), then you may
only need assign a drive letter. You also assign a drive letter using this
tool.

If you are not familiar with the XP disk management tool, use the XP
help&support center to search on "disk management". One of the articles
should be called "using the disk management".
 
bob,
thanks for advice, but i'm not sure how to proceed. drive is formatted and
device management shows it as drive F. but Explorer doesn't display it. The
URL in my original post had instructions from device mgt to change the drive
letter -- but changing it from F to G did no good, either. a tip from vendor
(Iomega) was to reformat drive from NTFS to FAT32. that worked successfully.
but did not fix the problem. any further tips will certainly be
appreciated... thanks,
david
 
david said:
bob,
thanks for advice, but i'm not sure how to proceed. drive is formatted and
device management shows it as drive F. but Explorer doesn't display it. The
URL in my original post had instructions from device mgt to change the drive
letter -- but changing it from F to G did no good, either. a tip from vendor
(Iomega) was to reformat drive from NTFS to FAT32. that worked successfully.
but did not fix the problem. any further tips will certainly be
appreciated... thanks,
david

:
Click to expand...

Do you have access to another computer? Do they work as expected there?
 
No, i only have the one computer and neither works as it should. I do have
access to a WinME computer, but i'm not sure what that might prove.... but
I'm open to options... :-)) let me know thoughts. thank you,
david
 
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