flash drive stopped working?

[excalibur3]

I have a jump drive and it works great with my win xp system but all of a sudden it stopped working (ironically in conjunction with a ethernet port that did the same thing). When I put it in I hear the sound and it says that there is a storage device plugged in that I can eject but it doesn't show up in my computer. What gives? I've tried out the drive in a few other computers and it works great.
Thanks,
Stephen

 

[Googer]

I have had the same problem in the past. It is an issue with in Windows. Did you check your device manager? Does it show up? Are there any "?" Icons?

 

[Jones2006]

I had this problem before ... first make sure USB connector on either your PC or the flash drive has no dust in ... and then check your partition in Disk Manager ... Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Disk Manager ... if you see the flash memory in there, then assign a drive letter to it

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Jones2006
I had this problem before ... first make sure USB connector on either your PC or the flash drive has no dust in ... and then check your partition in Disk Manager ... Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Disk Manager ... if you see the flash memory in there, then assign a drive letter to it

Great advice.

A nice way to check to see if dirty USB is the cause is if your bios supports USB device booting, then go in to the BIOS and see if the drive shows up; if it does then the USB is ok. Also try other USB decvices in that same usb port and see if they work with in Windows.

Also sometimes it is a DLL or Driver issue and Windows cannot initialze one or both of those. As a result the drive fails to load or be seen by the disk manager.

 

[excalibur3]

My bios doesn't support usb device booting, when i go into disk manager I can see it there and I can assign it a drive letter but it says that I need to restart it and when that happens it acts like i didn't assign it to a drive letter. It doesn't show up with a ? in device manager and it seems normal in the eject thing in the system tray.
Thanks!

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: excalibur3
My bios doesn't support usb device booting, when i go into disk manager I can see it there and I can assign it a drive letter but it says that I need to restart it and when that happens it acts like i didn't assign it to a drive letter. It doesn't show up with a ? in device manager and it seems normal in the eject thing in the system tray.
Thanks!

Can you see the drive in my computer? If so is there data stored on the flash drive? If no data is stored on the drive try to partition/format the drive with fat32. Also try plugging a mouse or keyboard in to the port where the usb drive is plugged in. And do you have a differant drive (borrow one, but back it up first) that you can play with on the troubled machine?

 

[excalibur3]

Sorry for the delay...I cannot see it in my computer and I can't partition it because after I assign a letter it makes me restart before I can format it but after the restart it "forgets" that I already assigned a letter to it.

 

[excalibur3]

Oh! so the reason why it makes me restart is that it says that the drive isn't enabled and to restart the computer to enable it. But it doesn't do that when I restart.

For what it's worth in my device manager I have a SM Bus Controller and PCI Input device that have question marks but I don't know enough about this computer to figure out what they are (I lack manuals).

 

[Googer]

It sounds like you are having a problem with Windows. Create An emeragency repair diskette (ERD) and use your windows cd to perform a repair installation.

 

[excalibur3]

Can I just boot off my windows cd to do the same thing?

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: excalibur3
Can I just boot off my windows cd to do the same thing?

Yes, but you will loose all of your settings and programs. An ERD takes only a few seconds to make.