problem reading USB drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff
  • Start date Start date
J

Jeff

....this one isn't my problem but a friend's, so I might not have 100% of the
details. ...thought I would ask this group for some clues - I have one idea,
but I'm not sure about others.

....friend works in a place where he does not have admin access to his
computer and the IT support ain't great (toward the point of being
non-existent). For some reason, his portable usb jump drives won't reliably
work in the machine. From what I understand, some drives work while others
do not.

I've been told that some of the older portable usb drives required
administrator access to load the necessary drivers, while most of the newer
ones apparently use some type of more universal driver that is already
loaded into XP. So, if you use these older drives on your own machine where
you have admin access the drivers load fine and all is well. When you take
them to a work type machine where you don't have admin access, the drivers
won't load and the things can't be read unless you get someone with admin
access to load the things.

....that explanation sounded reasonable, but I've never had the problem
because I've never been on a machine that I didn't have admin access to, so
I'm not sure if this is correct or if there is another explanation for why
some of the portable usb drives won't work in some machines while working
fine in others (and the machines are fairly new P4s running XP with the
latest patches and service packs).

Jeff
 
You are right. He would have to have Admin rights to load the USB drivers.
So he cannot use his jump drive.
 
You are right. He would have to have Admin rights to load the USB drivers.
So he cannot use his jump drive.

--
DaveW











- Show quoted text -

My wife's Dell had the same problem. Turned out the install form Dell
left some components out. I even down loaded the drivers for the
company that made the drive (that was fun. it took a few calls to tech
support because they insisted it would work with XP and shouldn't need
drivers) and got it running, only to have it quit after a Microsoft
update. We were having other problems loading drivers for other
devices, like a firewire card, and just reformatted and reinstalled
the OS, and everything worked ok after that.
 
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