USB thumb drive not recognised

I regularly use a USB mass storage device (thumb drive). The current device
works normally in other computers but when I plug it in to my home desktop
with XP, it does not appear in My Computer or Windows Explorer displays and I
can't access its content. It does however appear (as Drive E) with the
"Safely Remove Hardware" icon.
USB controllers and root hub are all reported as working normally.
Can anyone suggest how I can fix this?

joeth <joeth@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> I regularly use a USB mass storage device (thumb drive). The current
> device works normally in other computers but when I plug it in to my
> home desktop with XP, it does not appear in My Computer or Windows
> Explorer displays and I can't access its content. It does however
> appear (as Drive E) with the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon.
> USB controllers and root hub are all reported as working normally.
> Can anyone suggest how I can fix this?

Probably a drive letter assignment problem. You can either manually assign
the thumb drive to another letter in Disk Management, or can google for
USBDLM, a free utility that makes this problem go away.

joeth wrote:
> I regularly use a USB mass storage device (thumb drive). The current device
> works normally in other computers but when I plug it in to my home desktop
> with XP, it does not appear in My Computer or Windows Explorer displays and I
> can't access its content. It does however appear (as Drive E) with the
> "Safely Remove Hardware" icon.
> USB controllers and root hub are all reported as working normally.
> Can anyone suggest how I can fix this?

Probably the drive letter is hidden, see here:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html


Uwe