USB recognises everything save for flash drives

Calebros

As the title of the thread states, my computer recognizes everything but flash drives, in all ports (front and back), and from all ports on USB hubs. What's odd is that it recognizes SD cards in a USB reader, which I thought the computer saw in the same way as flash drives but I guess not. I know these 2 USB drives I have work, as they're recognized on other computers. I have both a XP Pro and a Win 7 Ultimate installation, and my computer behaves the same on both.

Nothing shows up under Device Manager, or Disk Management. The computer doesn't attempt to install drivers, or tell me a device installed improperly. Uninstalling the controllers and having them reinstall doesn't fix it. There are no driver updates I need to install. BIOS hasn't change since last the drives were recognized.

Any ideas?

Inkogneetoh

You havn't mentioned what OS your using, so im going to assume its Windows.

I had this problem a while back when I transferred my flash drives between work and home computers. Turned out what was happening was my home machine made the flash drive a drive letter that was the same as a network drive letter I was using at work, and it didn't change the letter when I plugged it in at work. So it was saying "this drive letters already taken, so rather than giving it a new letter, im just not going to show up".

To check its not doing this, on a friends computer (where the drive shows up) right click on 'My Computer' (ether on your desktop or start menu) and select Manange. Go down to Storage > Disk Management and find your flash drive. Right-clicking the flash drive will allow you to select 'Change Drive Letter and Paths'. Ensure that it is a letter (can be any, really) that isn't already being used on the computer that doesn't recognise it.

This is a bit of a longshot really, but worth a check.

Hope this helps

Calebros

actually I said I used both XP Pro and Win7 in the last sentence of the first part

and drive letters don't stay assigned when a removable storage device is unplugged, so that's not it. microsoft is smarter then that. i believe your problem was just from it being a network drive, so the computer said it had letter H (or whatever) free, and then the network said it also had H. even if that's not exactly how it works, i've never had that happen before on my computers in any case, and no configuration changes have taken place since the last time my drives were recognized properly

embrik

How familiar are you with Regedit?

If you know what you're doing, check the following -
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR\Start

If that DWORD value exists and is set to anything other than '3', the mass storage driver won't be allowed to load and will act exactly as you're describing. If it's 2 or 5 or whatever, change it to 3 and reboot.

Also, make sure that c:\windows\system32\drivers\usbstor.sys exists.

Torque Monkey

Same behavior in safemode?