USB Flash drive recognized - but doesn't show up in My Computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter madprogrammer
  • Start date Start date
M

madprogrammer

Hi folks,

I recently upgraded my computer by replacing the motherboard, CPU,
memory and video card. I kept my hard drives, and my Windows XP Home
install. It took some work, but after a repair install everything is up
and running smoothly.

Everything except one thing. I just bought an OCZ 512MB USB flash drive
and can't get it to work properly. The device is recognized, Windows
determines it to be a "USB Mass Storage Device", then "OCZ ET1208AD USB
Device", then "Disk Drive" and then tells me the hardware has been
installed successfully and is ready to use.

When I go to My Computer, it isn't there! (no "Removable Disk" or
anything.) It shows up under Disk Management, but without a drive
letter. Assigning it a drive letter helps somewhat but only temporarily
- I can access the drive by opening it from Disk Management, but it
never shows up in My Computer, and the next time I unplug it or reboot
the drive doesn't show up again. When I open it from Disk Manager I can
then add/remove/read files on the drive.

Apparently I am not the first person to have this problem, and I have
found suggested solutions all over the web and none of them work.

The drive *does* work on a Windows 2000 machine, and I've since
realized that my Creative Muvo MP3 player (which works like a flash
drive) is also following the same behaviour - and it definitely used to
work before I upgraded my computer.

Here's a list (probably not exhaustive) of things I have tried:
- rebooting with the drive plugged in
- removed all network drive mappings
- checked in TweakUI that drive letters are available
- formatted the drive as FAT32 from my Win2K machine
- Uninstalled the OCZ drive and USB Mass Storage Device items from
Device Manager, rebooting and then plugging in the drive again
- Uninstalled the USB Root Hubs and even the USB host controllers
- Uninstalled only the Enhanced (2.0) USB host controller forcing the
device to use 1.1, it gets recognized the same way but with the "this
device can work faster" warning, and still doesn't show up in My
Computer
- removed hidden devices in the device manager (such as all the old
devices from my old motherboard, video card, etc etc, and anything else
i could find that was old and probably not being used - and especially
anything USB related)
- removed the VID info for the USB drive from the registry

I am running Windows XP Home SP2 with all available updates.
My USB ports are built in to the motherboard which is an MSI K8N Neo4.
One thing that is slightly weird about my configuration: Windows XP is
installed on F:, which is on a disk with an extended partition G:, and
there is another disk with only one partition and no OS that is C:. D:
and E: are DVD/DVD-RW drives. I've even tried remapping DVD drives to
something else and trying to assign the flash drive to D: or E:, with
no luck.

I'm trying to avoid doing a clean install here (which seems to be the
only *consistent* solution on the web), and its my experience that if
you can fix it with a clean install, then you can fix it manually
without a clean install too!

If you can think of something I've missed, please let me know.

Thanks,
CJ
 
Hi there mad,

If you go back into disk management, you'll see that it probably snagged the
same drive letter as another device, or doesn't have one at all. Change the
drive letter and it should show up in My Computer.

Hope this helps!

Best Regards,

~Will
 
Nope, that was one of the first things I tried.

I can give it any letter and it still won't show up in My Computer. And
once I disconnect it and connect it again, it isn't assigned that drive
letter if I go back into Disk Management.

Thanks for the reply!
 
Here's a list (probably not exhaustive) of things I have tried:
- rebooting with the drive plugged in
- removed all network drive mappings
- checked in TweakUI that drive letters are available
- formatted the drive as FAT32 from my Win2K machine
- Uninstalled the OCZ drive and USB Mass Storage Device items from
Device Manager, rebooting and then plugging in the drive again
- Uninstalled the USB Root Hubs and even the USB host controllers
- Uninstalled only the Enhanced (2.0) USB host controller forcing the
device to use 1.1, it gets recognized the same way but with the "this
device can work faster" warning, and still doesn't show up in My
Computer
- removed hidden devices in the device manager (such as all the old
devices from my old motherboard, video card, etc etc, and anything else
i could find that was old and probably not being used - and especially
anything USB related)
- removed the VID info for the USB drive from the registry
Click to expand...

Nice list :-) Some addtitions:
There are reports that a failed intallation of the Daemon Tools V4
caused this behavior.

Another thing to try:

Create a system restore point first...
Then open Regedit and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2
Delete or rename the whole MountPoints2 hive.

Then go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
Delete or rename the whole MountedDevices hive.

Reboot and hope :-)

Then Windows will reassingn all letters and maybe it will assing
letters for USB drives again.


Finally you could try my USB drive letter manger. The next version
will be able to detect it when a new drive gets no letter. In this
case it assigns a letter and sends the Explorer a message that a
new drive has been added. So far it's tested under 'good conditions'
only, so I cannot say if it really works on your system.
Here is a test version:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/usbdlm_beta.zip

If you work as admin then just run the _start_debug.cmd and attach
your USB drive for a test.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe
 
Interesting... I think I may have had a failed install of Daemon Tools
V4 not long ago! - I'll look into that, and check if there is a
fix/work around.

On another note, I was just installing the Corel Draw X3 suite, and ran
Bitstream Font Navigator - it gives you the option to search your
drives for fonts. It listed Z: as an available drive (though when I
tried to expand it, it gave an error). There is no Z: in My Computer,
and I tried going there from the command line and the path did not
exist.

I just took a quick look at MountPoints2 and it has a lot of stuff in
it! MountedDevices is currently empty. Deleting the whole MountPoints2
hive kind of scares me. I'll look into this as well though.
 
Interesting... I think I may have had a failed install of Daemon Tools
V4 not long ago! - I'll look into that, and check if there is a
fix/work around.
Click to expand...

The fix is to delete some files from \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32

sptd.sys
secdrv.sys
sptd.sys
sptd????.sys (???? = numbers)

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/archive/index.php/t-7868.html
I just took a quick look at MountPoints2 and it has a lot of stuff in
it! MountedDevices is currently empty. Deleting the whole MountPoints2
hive kind of scares me. I'll look into this as well though.
Click to expand...


MountedDevices is empty? Very strange...



Uwe
 
Fixing the Daemon Tools install worked!

I used the instructions from "spe_ripper" on this thread:
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/showthread.php?p=58210
"- switch in safe mode...hit ESC when trying to load sptd.sys
- use sptdinst_x86.exe remove....if it says that no sptd drivers
installed there is no problem....go to the next step
- use sptdinst_x86.exe add
- it will ask you to restart the computer after they are installed
- restart in normal mode...install daemon 4.03 and it works!!!!! it
will not ask you to restart after installation."

I didn't have to do the last install step. I tried DaemonTools after I
rebooted and it worked fine, and the moment I plugged in my flash drive
it came up as J:

sptdinst_x86.exe is available at the daemon-tools website. I read in
their forums that if you have a 64 bit windows you should get
sptdinst_x64.exe.

Thanks for the tip Uwe, everything is working fine now!
 
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