usb flash drive shows NO FILES!

hello all,

i have a 3.74gb sony usb flash drive formatted as FAT32 that i've been using to move files from one machine to another. i've recently upgraded one of my machines from windows xp to windows 7. now for some reason the windows 7 machine doesn't see anything on the flash drive. i thought at first that the files had somehow been deleted, but when i plug it in to the windows xp machine, everything is there and windows xp reports no errors on the drive.

on the windows 7 machine, opening windows explorer displays the flash drive in the left pane, but selecting the drive results in nothing displayed on the right, where folder contents would normally be displayed. windows explorer blocks for about 30 seconds or so while it tries to find out what's on the drive, then displays an empty pane.

opening up computer management and going to storage => disk management, i see a 'disk 3' in the stack labeled w/the appropriate drive letter for the flash drive, but there is a mention beneath it saying 'no media'. right-clicking the disk icon and selecting 'properties' from the resulting pop-up menu shows me the driver pop-up w/the mention that the device is working properly. the 'volumes' tab shows capacity, unallocated space, and reserved space all at 0 mb, w/a partition style of 'master boot record'. if i try to right-click the section to the right that usually has a graphical representation of the partitition, nothing happens.

i have a usb hub connected to one of the usb ports. i disconnected the thumb drive from the straight-in connection and connected it to the usb hub. now i can see the drive in computer management, the drive is now correctly identified [size, partition info, and allocation], but windows explorer still displays no files or folders on the drive, as if it were completely empty. if i right-click the right pane that shows the partition, i can select 'format' and try to format it as ntfs, but then virtual disk mgr gives me the error 'the system cannot find the file specified'.

anyone have any ideas what's going on here ?

thanks,
dave

ICIT2LOL said:

Hello Dave now does the stick show files on any other of your machines??

yup. when i plug it in to my windows xp machine, everything is there, right where it should be.

thanks ! looks like some good info, i'll give it a try.

no joy, unfortunately. same as before -- the usb stick appears valid in windows xp, but on windows 7, although the device appears and is reported as functioning correctly, there's no disk associated with it. >

no, it doesn't even show up. but, 'a picture is worth 1,000 words', so here are... 3,000 more for you.

first, the screenie you asked for. as you can see, even though the disk shows up on the left pane of the partition diagram, the media itself doesn't show up on the right. and there's no disk at all in the list of volumes at the top.


next, a shot of the device in dev mgr -


finally, a more detailed look at the driver -


i thought it might be a driver issue, so i checked out sony's site, but they say the usb flash drivers included w/windows 7 are the correct ones i should be using...

don't know if any of this helps, but hopefully someone w/more savvy than me can point something out.

thanks again to everyone for your help so far.

Hi David,

not sure but i believe its due to your non standard set-up, using GPT,
have a look at this from MS, basically i can see it but cant use it, i need a drive letter.

What partitions are mounted by default by Windows?

Windows exposes only basic data partitions. Other partitions with FAT file systems may be mounted, but not exposed only programmatically. Only basic data partitions are assigned drive letters or mount points.
The ESP FAT file system is mounted, but not exposed. This allows programs running under Windows to update the contents of the ESP. Assigning a drive letter to the ESP using ‘mountvol /s’ will allow access to the partition. Access to the ESP requires admin privilege. Although the MSR, and any partitions created from the MSR, could have recognizable file systems, none are exposed.
Any OEM-specific partitions or partitions associated with other operating systems are not recognized by Windows. Unrecognized partitions with recognizable file systems are treated like the ESP. They will be mounted, but not exposed. Unlike MBR disks, there is no practical difference between OEM-specific partitions and other operating system partitions; all are "unrecognized."


Roy

torchwood said:

not sure but i believe its due to your non standard set-up, using GPT,
have a look at this from MS, basically i can see it but cant use it, i need a drive letter.

but the GPT is on a completely different disk, disk2. the usb flash drive is disk3. if i understand the microsoft post correctly, they're talking about not exposing the gpt partition of a disk so it appears in explorer. in my case, the disk -- which is an mbr disk -- isn't being displayed at all. i.e., there isn't even a partition to display in the volume mgr so it can be exposed, or not.