USB Problem

[smokey]

SO here it is - I put in a mouse/keyboard and they work perfectly. I put in a flash drive (any) or external HDD (many tried) and they show up - get installed, got hte little green "safely remove" icon at the bottom, but they dont show in explorer (well, ok, I use Total Commander, but I have tried with WE). However, if I restart the computer - they show up in explorer, but when I click on them (the drives - or should I say double click) the window freezes (only the instance of explorer/TC - other programs such as email/browser/card games run fine) and it goes on like that for quite a while.

Now, after waiting for the bloody program to respond - it asks me if I want to format the drive - so I tried with my flash drive coz it had nothing on it and then another great pause and then it tells me that the drive can't be formatted. It then goes back to normal - I can select an internal harddrive or my dvdr, but not the magical removable storage.

Whats up? What can I do about it? Is it serious?

Yours etc etc,

Seriously Ticked Off, OBE

 

[rwenzori]

I'm sure the boffins will answer, but the one time I have seen this was with a HP printer plugged in to one of the USB ports - no recognition of a flash drive until you unplugged the HP printer. I just bought an add-on USB card.

 

[LazyLion]

That is very weird!

1) How many USB ports does this computer have?
2) Are they all on the motherboard, or do you have any USB add-in cards?
3) Are they all USB 2.0 ports?
4) What does your device manager show? Are they all working ok?
5) Which chipset and driver do they use?
6) What is your make of motherboard?
7) Which version of Windows?

 

[PsyWulf]

%SystemRoot%\system32\compmgmt.msc /s

Disk management

See if the flash drive is appearing in the disk list

If yes right click on the device and change the drive letter
If no head to device manager and head to Universal Serial Bus Controllers
- check if Mass Storage Device is listed there
- If yes check if it's listed under disk drives
- if no then reload all the USB host controller drivers,first the driver you got with the mobo,if not replace with the Standard Universal Controller drivers