Flash drives not recognized

Question

My USB ports are working for other devices but not Flash Drives. The system detects the device and shows it as a "USB Mass Storage Device" in the system tray, but does not assign it a drive letter or display it in My Computer.

Disk management, under Removable Storage, displays an error message "The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it."

Clues:

My flash drives work on other PCs.

An external WD Passport portable drive IS recognized and fully usable.

System Restore is not working.

System is a Dell 4700, Windows Media Center Home Ed. SP3, 1 GB RAM

Any advice would be appreciated,

George P.

Irish2009 · Answer

Give this a shot... Go to My Computer and right click. Select Manage . In the left pane of the Computer Management utility, click Disk Management . In the lower right pane, find the USB drive and right click the drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths . Click Change and on the right side click the down arrow and select a drive letter. You will only be given open drive letters to choose from. Click OK and Yes . Now go to My Computer or Windows Explorer and you should see your USB drive with the letter that you assigned it. With this information, you can assign your USB drive a drive letter . From this point on, if nothing changes, the USB drive will have the same drive letter. Your USB drive may not and probably will not have the same drive letter on other computers.   Thanks

TheRealFireblad · Answer

Re system restore not working George: There's a suggestion on this page - under the heading 'Why won't System Restore work on my machine?' (as you'd expect :emotion-2:).

“Here are some basic troubleshooting step to find why System Restore is not working:

Verify that the System Restore service is running on your computer. Here's how:

A. Go to Start>> Run. Type in: cmd [Enter] or click OK.
B. At the command prompt, type in: net start [Enter]

Here you will see a list of the services that are enabled on your system. Scroll the list alphabetically until you find the System Restore Service entry see (fig.#1).
If it is not found, then System Restore is not running.
For instructions on how to enable System Restore, see: How can I enable or disable System Restore.

Verify that the task Scheduler is running on your computer.

See the instructions above. Instead, scroll the alphabetical list for the Task Scheduler service.
If it is not running:

A. Go to Start>> Run. Type in: services.msc [Enter] or click OK.
B. Scroll the alphabetical list until you find the Task Scheduler entry.
C. Make sure the Service is set to "Automatic" and the status is "started".

Make sure that you have enough disk space available. When your disk space falls below 200MB, System Restore will not create Restore Points any longer.
You will need to free up disk space for this feature to become available again.”

George_P · Answer

Thanks, I followed your directions but my USB Flash Drive (plugged in) does not show an entry in the lower right hand pane under Disk Management.

I know that the system acknowledges it's presence because I get the audio tones. The Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray lists the presence of the device but with no drive letter.

It's a mystery...

George P.

George_P · Answer

Thanks for the info, but 'those birds have flown'! Both processes are running and I can actually start the System Restore utility and use it up to the point where I enter text and click OK. Then I get the message 'Unable to create a restore point....reboot...blah, blah, blah'  Rebooting doesn't help. George P.

Windows General

Flash drives not recognized

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