USB storage inop?

[Rayhawqa]

I used to be able to plug my memorex 256mb storage drive into the front of my pc and use it. Yesterday I had an external hdd hooked up instead. When I finished with that, I plugged in my memorex unit and nothing. The safe to disc. icon showed it there but "My Computer" does not. When I click on safe to disc. and hit properties, it says device is working properly. It says USB Mass Storage device at location 0. Any ideas? I'm running windows xp sp1 and this is a work pc with only E drive avail as my usb drive.

 

[JohnWill]

Unplug ALL USB devices.
Open Device Manager.
View, Show Hidden Devices.
Uninstall all devices under USB Controllers.
Uninstall all devices under Storage Volumes. Say no to any reboot prompts until you are finished. Also, if a Storage Volume doesn't uninstall, ignore it and move to the next one.
If you have a yellow ? with unknown devices, uninstall all of the entries there as well.

When this is done, reboot TWICE.

Reconnect the USB devices and see if they're recognized properly.

 

[Rayhawqa]

Well that didn't work. I did retry my external hdd after the memorex unit failed to show up and the hdd works fine. I'm at a loss for an explanation.

 

[JohnWill]

Well, I'd try two things. First, try the device in another machine to rule out the FLASH drive as being defective. Second, install SP2 on the problem machine.

 

[Rayhawqa]

Tried the unit in 2 other pc's and it works fine. I can't install sp2 since this is a company computer and I.T. isn't ready for it at any rate.
Does the machine "remember" the 4 gb hdd and decide not to "notice" the flashdrive? Sounds stupid, but ......

 

[JohnWill]

If you did my little raindance, it shouldn't remember any USB mass storage. I've had several machines that will get confused and crash when you plug in a USB FLASH or hard disk drive, this has always restored them to reality.