W7 Tip - Missing external USB drives

Hi all

just a little tip which I hope can save some of you a big bother of plugging in and re-plugging usb drives in frustration.

Have you ever plugged in a USB drive - seen the installing driver etc and after the message your device is ready for use you can't see it at all in Windows explorer.

What happens in these cases is that it either finds the volume letter is already in use or windows just doesn't assign one.


Go to Control panel==>administrative tools==>computer management===>Disk Management.

Scroll down and you'll probably see something like DISK 3 with no letter assigned.

Simply assign a volume letter and then you'll see it in Windows explorer.

Cheers
jimbo

Does Windows 7 still assign a drive letter to a USB drive even if that drive letter has already been assigned to a mapped network drive?

jimbo45 said:

Hi all

just a little tip which I hope can save some of you a big bother of plugging in and re-plugging usb drives in frustration.

Have you ever plugged in a USB drive - seen the installing driver etc and after the message your device is ready for use you can't see it at all in Windows explorer.

What happens in these cases is that it either finds the volume letter is already in use or windows just doesn't assign one.


Go to Control panel==>administrative tools==>computer management===>Disk Management.

Scroll down and you'll probably see something like DISK 3 with no letter assigned.

Simply assign a volume letter and then you'll see it in Windows explorer.

Cheers
jimbo

I have that issue,though when I go to disk management,it does have a drive letter assigned but doesn't show up in Windows explorer.
The usb drives that I have plugged in do show up but there's three drive letter for various memory card slots (empty) that do not. Used to in Vista.
Any ideas?