Removable USB Drive Not Recognized

karlsnooks · 25 Feb 2010

If you want to decrease problems arising from permissions, then copy the file to usb stick formatted in fat32 or fat.

You can see the difference by checking the properties of the file on one of your ntfs-formatted drives and comparing those to the properties of the file on the fat32-formatted drive.

AccessChk.exe which is from the SysInternals' folk might be of interest to you.

I'll attach a file on accesschk.

Ozibot · 26 Feb 2010

Night Hawk said:

I see those in other brands as well. As far as data you would want to backup anything presently on it and then go into the Disk Management tool and right click on the item there to select "format". You will then see the options for Fat 32 or NTFS which you will want.

When first buying any flash drive or external HD before putting any files on I reformat it to the file system it will be used for. For Windows NTFS, for something like writing a bootable iso image for GParted live or ubuntu then I simply let the program write the iso to the Fat volume it comes with.

When reformatting the factory partitions to convert it from Fat to NTFS you can then plug it into an XP machince as well as a Vista or 7 system to still see if readily available for transferring files as well as general acccess by the older versions. NTFS has been the native file system since Windows 2000 making it universal for all Windows machines and portability.

Night Hawk - sincere thanks for your help. I wish I would have had the forethought to reformat this drive when I purchased it. I was on Windows Vista at the time, and have used the drive on Vista, XP and other machines quite successfully (I can't ever remember the drive not being "found").

As best I can tell, the best solution would be to buy a new usb drive and then convert it to NTFS. Then I plug the new NTFS drive into an older (Vista) machine, plug the old USB drive into the same machine, and then swap the older files over to the new NTFS USB drive.

This is far more attractive than burning 25 DVDs to backup the drive and then reformatting it.

Thanks again for your help, looking forward to accessing these files again.

Ozibot · 26 Feb 2010

karlsnooks said:

If you want to decrease problems arising from permissions, then copy the file to usb stick formatted in fat32 or fat.

You can see the difference by checking the properties of the file on one of your ntfs-formatted drives and comparing those to the properties of the file on the fat32-formatted drive.

AccessChk.exe which is from the SysInternals' folk might be of interest to you.

I'll attach a file on accesschk.

Thanks karlsnooks. I ran the accesschk software and it spat out the permissions on folders in C:

I did not see anything about the Z: - which is what I am calling my (FAT32) USB drive (the Toshiba MK2552GSX), this is the drive that is not recognized in Windows 7.

Night Hawk · 26 Feb 2010

Ozibot said:

Night Hawk - sincere thanks for your help. I wish I would have had the forethought to reformat this drive when I purchased it. I was on Windows Vista at the time, and have used the drive on Vista, XP and other machines quite successfully (I can't ever remember the drive not being "found").

As best I can tell, the best solution would be to buy a new usb drive and then convert it to NTFS. Then I plug the new NTFS drive into an older (Vista) machine, plug the old USB drive into the same machine, and then swap the older files over to the new NTFS USB drive.

This is far more attractive than burning 25 DVDs to backup the drive and then reformatting it.

Thanks again for your help, looking forward to accessing these files again.

You're welcome!

I learned that lesson when buying the first external drive here and decided to wipe the factory Fat volume and software off of the drive rather then the need to reinstall the software each time the drive was plugged with the former XP/Vista dual boot. Fortunately I was able to copy everything back onto one of the internal drives at the time to see that done.

As a rule the Fat 32 volumes provided are for compatibility with Mac as well as PC formats. The first thing I advise for Winodws users of course is to simply dump that off of any new drive or device before putting anything on it. That keeps people from running into the exact same problems you saw there.