Flash drive not assigning drive letter

Jonny Two Shoes

Expert Member
Joined
Nov 13, 2006
Messages
4,542
Reaction score
17
Location
Gauteng
Hi there,

I thought I may as well just throw this question out here as uncle google is being of no assistance to me :/

I have a flash disk. I plug flash disk into my desktop. It picks up the hardware but assigns no drive letter to it so I can't access it. I can still safely remove flash disk.

I log off and log into admin account, suddenly flash disk picks up fine and assigns E:\ to it.

So this didn't bother me much as I had a workaround, I just used my admin account when I needed to use the flash disk.

Now one of my users has the same problem. In both our cases the flash drive worked before but not anymore. I can't give him admin rights.

Any ideas why it would be doing this? I will continue looking around and playing around but will check back here now and then if someone has the answer.

Thanks :)

EDIT: both me and the user do not have any network drives assigned to E
 
Have you tried changing the drive letter? This sometimes happens if you are on a network and the flashdrive wants the network drive letter (ie F: ) which it can't get. My workaround on XP is to go: right click My Computer, Manage, Disk Management, click on fashdrive and change the drive letter.
 
Every time I come up against this it's because Windoze has assigned the flash drive a letter that conflicts with an existing drive letter ..and yes, I see your edit. :p.

So do this: go into the management console (compmgmt.msc from the start button), go to drive management and look for the drive letter clash there - you're looking for a removable drive disk of, obviously, the same capacity as your stick; it will (should!) also be the only device formatted as FAT32. If you find it there, RHS click it, select [change drive letter and paths] and reassign it to a new letter. You will always find it on that drive letter from there on out.
 
yup thats works everytime goobie

program i found is sometimes it does it everytime and you have to manually change it which is annoying when your client is phoning you day after day because they dont remember how to do it :)
 
This will also happen if you have a card reader installed as Windows assigns drive letters to each slot. So it's not only an issue with mapped network drives.
 
Just want to say thanks to all. As the account had no admin rights I of course could not edit the settings or even get into disk management. I also thought it strange that different accounts would handle it differently.

So just by making the troublesome account an admin temporarily and changing the assigned drive letter in disk management it managed to pick it up thereafter. I still can't imagine a different user account managing disk management differently on the same PC but I guess it makes sense as each could have their own login scripts and drive letters assigned :)

Schweet :)
 
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X