We are having some problems with our PC at work, it's running XP and works well in general but for some reason when we plug in a USB memory stick we get the 'bing bong' sound saying that we have plugged the device in but the drive never appears in 'My Computer'. At first we thought it must be an issue with the memory stick so we tried a few others and we still get the same problem, Which made me think maybe it's a USB fault so we tried plugging in a Freecom USB floppy drive and it worked fine. I'm not to sure where to look next, Any ideas??
TurboSquid
Is the computer an OEM computer or retail?
The computer has to do a few steps to make the usb drive appear in my computer.
-First you plug in the usb stick into the computer
-The computer recognises the usb stick, then loads the needed drivers. After that windows has to assign a drive letter to the drive so you can access it in my computer.
I think the problem might be with the last step, i remember some problems on my old school which looked the same. Windows tried to assign a drive letter that was already in use, so the usb stick would never show up.
Can you try to plug-in the USB drive while windows is still booting, before you login to windows then windows should be able to give it a correct drive letter, then you should be able to access the drive from my computer.
There should be a solution if that is the case.
If you have a network environment, especially Novell, this is very probably the cause. You can either solve it by putting in your USB before you log in (and so before the network 'takes away' the driveletter 'G' (which you most of the time can't see it does, but it does)) or by opening the Control Panel, browse to administrative tools, open Computer Management, look under Storage. There you see Disk Management. If everything is right, you can see your USB-drive here. Click on it with the right mouse button and choose to assign a drive letter to it. Choose an uncommon letter, for example 'W' or 'U' or 'K'. This letter will be assigned to your USB-drive so you can use it.
The next time you insert it, the pc will remember your setting and assign that letter to it, unless your administrator cleaned the computer, wiping out the setting you made.
Good Luck!
JohanFH
