USB mass storage device not getting drive letter

  • Thread starter Thread starter ykhan
  • Start date Start date
Leo said:
My USB drive works fine on a system with two other hard drives.

Get TweakUI and be sure to set last drive to Z.
Click to expand...

I did check it out with TweakUI originally.

Yousuf Khan
 
Scott said:
I'm assuming that the drive is already partitioned and formatted. When you
plug it into your desktop and bring up the Disk Management plugin, is it not
showing up at all? The drive and its partitions should show up there,
whether one or more drive letters are allocated to the drive or not. I've
had parts of flash-card readers not get drive letters when they're plugged
in because they were already taken by network shares or other drives; going
into Disk Management and reassigning drive letters has always cleared up the
problem for me.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it was already partitioned and formatted. In fact, it was
carrying some data for me that I wanted to transfer between a couple of
my machines, which I was not able to transfer because of this problem.

It's like as if the partition has gone totally missing. Actually even
if it was a completely blank unpartitioned disk, it would still show up
inside disk manager which would then give me the option to partition
and format it. But it doesn't show that.

Yousuf Khan
 
Usually yes.

Were you asking a question or making an observation?

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

Sorry, I realised just after posting that my question may have been
ambiguous. What I was asking was whether a flash drive is assigned a
drive letter on *your* system in its present state. If so, then this
could shed some light on any LASTDRIVE issue, ie it could confirm
whether additional drive letters were available. Does the USB HD's
drive letter show up in Device Manager but not in Explorer, or is it
missing from both? Is it possible that the drive letter is hidden
(Tweakui should be able to tell you this)? If you switch to a command
prompt, can you see the HD using a DIR command?


- Franc Zabkar
 
share.

No, "Drive" Manager (actually is "Disk" Manager, but I know what you
meant) is not showing it at all as a volume. If it showed up in Disk
Manager, I would've known what to do with it then.

Strangely enough, now this drive is not showing up on its original home
either, where it was working previously. I'm going to have see what
else is going on here, maybe something got shaken loose while I was
transporting it?
Click to expand...

Does it still show in Device Manager as a drive? If so what does Populate
show?
 
George said:
Does it still show in Device Manager as a drive? If so what does Populate
show?
Click to expand...

Yes, it shows under Device Manager, Disk Drives, as "USB 2.0 Storage
Device USB Device".

I don't see a Populate option for it.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yes, it shows under Device Manager, Disk Drives, as "USB 2.0 Storage
Device USB Device".

I don't see a Populate option for it.
Click to expand...

Under the Volumes tab of a disk/cd/dvd etc. drive there should be a
Populate button. If it ain't there, I'd think something might be wrong
with the MBR - not sure if bootitng www.bootitng.com works with USB yet but
it'd be worth a try to see what it makes of it. Other than that if you
care about the data, some other disk fix software?
 
The mystery has been solved. The drive inside the enclosure seems to
have died. I took a drive out of another laptop and plugged it into
here and found that it worked. There's a little airhole in these laptop
drives how much clearance is needed above them?

Yousuf Khan
 
Hi, removing the side of your case and blowing cool air inside, maybe a
hairdryer, might prove whether it's a heat issue. Other than that I've seen
the same issue when the memory chips of the card are failing....
ChrisC
 
The mystery has been solved. The drive inside the enclosure seems to
have died. I took a drive out of another laptop and plugged it into
here and found that it worked. There's a little airhole in these laptop
drives how much clearance is needed above them?
Click to expand...

The air hole is for pressure equalization and not for ventilation. No
clearance is required.

One issue I've observed is that some USB enclosures for 2.5" notebook
drives do not use an external power source and instead rely on a
"double" USB plug. This causes problems with certain systems, and can
cause the symptoms you described. Sometimes the drive won't spin up,
and sometimes it won't get a drive letter. And these problems may come
and go, or not appear at all on certain systems, depending on the
amount of power supplied by the USB ports.
- -
Gary L.
Reply to the newsgroup only
 
Alan Walpool said:
Try using diskpart from the commandline to assign a drive. Hope this
works it has worked for me when I needed to make a drive showup. Could
be something else.

Later,

Alan


ykhan> I got an external USB hard disk enclosure. It works fine on my
ykhan> laptop, it gets detected, drivers get loaded, and everything
ykhan> shows up fine in Device Manager, and a drive letter is
ykhan> assigned to it. When I put the same device onto my desktop,
ykhan> almost everything happens the same, except it doesn't get a
ykhan> drive letter assigned to it. I don't see it in Disk Manager.

ykhan> All computers are running XP SP2. I've tried it in a second
ykhan> desktop PC with XP SP2 as well, and exact same thing happens
ykhan> -- no drive letter, no recognition from Disk Manager, but
ykhan> Device Manager sees it fine doesn't find any problems with it.

ykhan> Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...
 
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