W2K sees my new Flash Drive but XP doesn't

[Felecha]

I've recently got a new job where I've been shuttling my files from work to home daily. It's about 15mb, so a floppy won't do. I have usually been zipping them and emailing them home and back, but at least 3 times now they have not arrived. So I took to burning the zip onto a CD that I take back and forth, but that is somewhat of a nuisance, my burner at home has never been easy to use.

Whine, whine, whine.

So I decided to try one of those new USB Flash Drive things. i know a couple of people who have told me they're just the greatest. I stopped last night at BestBuy and got a PNY / USB 1.1 / 64mb, and at home I played with it and both my desktop and laptop worked perfectly with it. So fast and easy. I was delighted. Both of those are running Windows 2000 Pro.

But here I am at work, and my XP machine won't show it in Windows Explorer. It pops up that little indicator in the systray, and Device Manager shows it as there under Disk Drives, and says it's working properly. It just doesn't show in Windows Explorer. At home it showed as Removable Storage [F].

Any idea what's the problem?

 

[mrweirdo]

hrm strange i have never had any problems with a usb drive in xp. It makes me wonder that since it system to be detecting the drive and showing up in the device manager but you cant access it, if there is some kind of permisions set on your work machine that is keeping you from being able to access it.

 

[Felecha]

permissions? More detail?

I am logged in as an Administrator

 

[Felecha]

I found in the FAQ at PNY, 2 ideas specifically for "I installed the Flash Drive but Windows doesn't see it"

1. Make sure the BIOS has USB "Enabled" -- It's a Dell Dimension 8300, and in BIOS it says ON for USB Controller. I think that must be OK, it has a USB printer that has worked since day 1.

2. Restore the USB drivers. I found a Driver CD in the fistful of CD's that came with the machine. I don't know how to find the one or ones I would want, though. And again, if I have a USB printer (and mouse, come to think of it), how could the driver be bad. I'm reluctant to muck around with the company's computer and screw up the drivers.

Any other ideas?

 

[Felecha]

well, a further clue. I only tried it before on the two identical Dell 8300's the company just got (I work on one of them). I got a chance just now to try it on several other XP machines in the office, an HP laptop, a Compaq laptop, and a custom-built desktop. They all worked fine.

So there's something about the Dells that doesn't do it

 

[Kristi2k]

Does yours have the latest BIOS update or USB drivers? (Work PC)

 

[Felecha]

just bought it and set it up 2 weeks ago. First thing I did was go to Windows Updates for Critical Updates. Nothing specific about USB drivers that I know of, though.

 

[Felecha]

Here's the answer, off a Dell forum.

It's a Windows OS issue. A removable storage drive has to have an available drive letter, of course.

If after your local drives, the next one is a network drive, Windows is unable to go on further to the end of the line and look for the next letter and use that. I had a network drive mapped as E: after the regular Crive and the DVD drive.

The solution was to bump the network drive to one drive letter further on, to F:, leaving E open for the flash drive to find.

It worked slick, of course.

 

[Kristi2k]

Strange, I haven't had this problem with 2000 before. Good to know what fixed it though.