How do I get hidden USB drives to work again.

[sarelp]

Thanks everybody for a excellent forum,

I'm a total noob here and I have to admit I'm no computer expert so please bear with me.

I noticed it the other day when a friend gave me a USB stick with pictures on it that my computer wont recognize it. You can hear the bleep noise when you insert it but nothing happens. Ended up taking the stick to Walgreens to have the pictures made. I thought maybe the stick was not formatted for my computer and I left it at that.

Couple of days ago I wanted to load some music for my wife on her iPad, well it won't see it either. It won't even charge it. I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it again. And still nothing. It does pickup and work with our iPhones though. I did some searching and found the following.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/165554-usb-driver-general-fix-problems.html

Well I tried that and now my computer wont go to sleep, I cannot adjust the speaker volume on the keyboard, my DVD drive will pick up a DVD but it wont read the info on it and the USB drives still wont pick up the USB devices.

The computer did not came with a disc so I don't know what tot do. I'm not smart enough to know what to uninstall or what to install.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks !!

 

[Ztruker]

DriveCleanup (about halfway down the page) removes all currently non present "Storage Volumes", "Disk", "CDROM", "Floppy" USB drives and their USB devices from the device tree. Furthermore it removes orphaned registry items related to these device types. Since V0.8 it removes WPD devices under Vista and Win7.

This often fixes these kinds of USB problems.

 

[sarelp]

Which one ? Can you give me a step by step please.

 

[jumanji]

Download v 0.8.1 of the drivecleanup.zip from Drive Tools for Windows.

Unzip it to a folder, say drivecleanup.

You will have two folders Win32 and x64 each containing DriveCleanup.exe for 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.

Remove all USB storage devices from your system (except your Keyboard and mouse) and reboot.

Right click on the DriveCleanup.exe and run as administrator. (Use the *.exe file appropriate for your bit version of Windows.).

After the clean up act, reboot.

( When you plug in your USB devices after this cleanup these will be installed afresh. What you have done is to remove all non-present devices and drive letters associated with them and start with a clean slate. )

 

[Slartybart]

Anchored reference to DriveCleanup

 

[sarelp]

Do I have to extract the files ?

 

[Ztruker]

Yes, it's a zip file.