USB/Flash Drive Malfunction

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Greetings,

My Windows XP SP2 Desktop failed to link up with one of my USB drives.

The PC usually recognizes the presence of an external drive by showing a new Drive (E:) on my Windows Explorer. This holds true for all my USB drives but not my brand new 8GB USB drive.

However, the Systray on my taskbar does indicate its presence with the icon which one should click for “Safely Remove Hardware”. To me, it indicates desktop acknowledge its presence but cannot establish a link to it. I.e. this drive is garbage.

Am I on the right track or can someone give me an idea as to how to resolve this problem?

Thanks.

Duck

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If it’s new it might need to be formatted.

1. Right click on My Computer and select Manage.
2. Go to Disk Management and look for the USB drive.
3. Right click on the tag that says “Removable disk” and see if it offers “initialize”. If so you want to initialize the disk.
4. Right click on the tag to the right and select “Create Partition” – I think. You want a Primary partition.
5. Quick format the partition as NTFS.

Be careful, you don’t want to format your data drive.

cheers, Paul

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Do you have a reason to stick with SP2? Otherwise, a newer USB drive drive may work better with SP3. Unless you need (for example) to manage a Creative Zen Jukebox Xtra, there are plenty of good reasons to go to SP3.

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Thanks Paul, Patrick.

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The drive may need to be assigned a drive letter. go to control panel, administration tools, computer management, disk management. If the disk appears there, you can format and assign a drive letter then it will appear in windows explorer.

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