USB Drives not showing up

[indy-pc]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 with Vista (x86) that won't recognize a couple of my new Kingston DT108 (8GB) USB thumb drives. Vista has all of the updates installed and (from what I can tell) all of the drivers are current.

1) The flash drives show up on my desktop and other systems without an issue.

2) I have an older Kingston drive (2GB) that shows up just fine

3) I have tried the drives in every USB port on the system (so I know it's not just one bad port)


I've tried doing a little troubleshooting on it, but I'm just spinning my tires here. The drives don't show up in explorer or Disk Management. What am I missing?

 

[SmithFamilyDesigns]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 with Vista (x86) that won't recognize a couple of my new Kingston DT108 (8GB) USB thumb drives. Vista has all of the updates installed and (from what I can tell) all of the drivers are current.

1) The flash drives show up on my desktop and other systems without an issue.

2) I have an older Kingston drive (2GB) that shows up just fine

3) I have tried the drives in every USB port on the system (so I know it's not just one bad port)


I've tried doing a little troubleshooting on it, but I'm just spinning my tires here. The drives don't show up in explorer or Disk Management. What am I missing?

You say it doesn't recognize a couple of your drives, but does it recognize any other drives? Is this a universal USB issue?

Edit: Just saw that a 2Gb drive works. Any others?

 

[indy-pc]

Edit: Just saw that a 2Gb drive works. Any others?

I also have a Seagate 500GB GoFlex external hard drive that's not showing up either. It lights up, so it's drawing power. Windows just doesn't "see" it.

 

[SmithFamilyDesigns]

I also have a Seagate 500GB GoFlex external hard drive that's not showing up either. It lights up, so it's drawing power. Windows just doesn't "see" it.

I would say the first place to start, just for confirmation, would be to pop in a PE or Linux disc to make sure the computer can see them. From there, you probably have either corrupt USB inf's or bad registry entries.

 

[Shark]

See if this program can see it. And if so, try formating it.
HDDGURU

 

[indy-pc]

@SFD:
I'm not quite sure I'm following you on the PE/Linux disc idea. Are you suggesting that I boot into a different OS and see if they recognize the drives? I suppose that would tell me if it has something to do with the OS or the system as a whole. Although, it can see the 2GB Kingston just fine.

So, what should I do about it if it is a corrupt usb.inf or bad registry? I'm trying to get to the root of the problem and understand they why and how. I appreciate any help you can provide.

@Shark:
If my system can't see the drives at all, how would installing a low-level formatting software help me? Will it be able to detect drives that Vista won't?

More attempts at troubleshooting...
- I attempted to fix the issue by moving and renaming the INFCACHE.1 system file, restarting and rebuilding the file by reinstalling an unrelated driver (WLAN driver). No luck.

- I repeated the above 2 or 3 more times with no changes. I read that it may take a few attempts to get it work.

- Since my laptop is just a practice system anyway, I did a N&P just to check. I haven't reinstalled any drivers or updates, but I get the same issue. The 2GB drive shows up just fine, but nothing with the others. I was tired and getting irritated, so I just left it at that last night and went to bed. I'll get everything reinstalled and updated and check again later.


I realize that I have lots to learn still and I want to use this issue as a learning experience as I have never seen something like this before. I've needed to update drivers before when nothing shows up, but having some show up and not others is new to me.

Trying to brainstorm any possible differences:
- Could the larger size be a problem? (2GB works vs. 8GB not)
- Could the file system be a problem? (NTFS works vs. FAT32 not)
- The external hard drive worked on this system at one point (used it to image the laptop), but I haven't used it in some time. What could have changed this?

Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[roycom]

Not to sound silly, but do you get the same problem in safe mode? Things like mobile phone software have been known to screw with usb devices.

You could also see if the drives show up in the BIOS under boot options or just use a boot cd as mentioned above to rule out non Windows issues.

 

[indy-pc]

I'll check the boot options and safe mode when I get home tonight. There shouldn't be any other software conflicts going on. Being my "practice machine", the only things I had installed on it were Flash, Reader, Office, Silverlight and maybe one or two other utilities (like Paragon backup).

My gut tells me that it's a Windows issue. Either a missing driver somewhere or something. I just don't know what else it could be. Since I had updated to the latest driver (before the N&P), I figured that would have solved the issue. Apparently not, though....

 

[stevenamills]

I've had some luck using Nirsoft's USDDeview to blow out all the USB stuff and then rebooting.

Might be worth a try.

 

[indy-pc]

I've had some luck using Nirsoft's USDDeview to blow out all the USB stuff and then rebooting.

Might be worth a try.

What do you mean? Just using USBDeview to uninstall all previous USB devices? I've never used the software, but I'll give it a try. Since I did a N&P, though, I would expect that there really isn't much that would show up with this software, though.

 

[doctorlou]

Sometimes windows see a usb drive but hesitates on giving it a drive letter. Try right clicking on My Computer, select manage, then click on Disk Manager. If you see it there, but it has no letter, try right clicking on the device and select Change drive letter and paths. At that point you can assign a letter. Let us know if that works.

 

[indy-pc]

I tried that already. In the OP, I said that it wasn't showing up in Disk Management. A good suggestion, though! Thanks. Unfortunately, that didn't work. :-(

 

[doctorlou]

And then I saw the OP, sorry about that. Has the Event viewer revealed anything? As in earlier in the thread try some type of live OS as well. Good luck.

 

[Honeymonster]

I also have a Seagate 500GB GoFlex external hard drive that's not showing up either. It lights up, so it's drawing power. Windows just doesn't "see" it.

I had this problem when using my 2.5' external drive enclosure on some laptops and my netbook. The drive appeared to power up but wouldn't show in Windows. I had to use a USB "Y" cable, one that has two USB A ends and one mini B. It could be that one port on the laptop doesn't provide sufficient power to the external drive.

I had a look to see if I can find any details about the power consumption of an 8GB drive vs a 2GB drive but I'm not having much luck. Could it be a power issue?

 

[cooltech]

It sound like it needs to be formatted/reformatted. I had the same thing happen two week ago.I plug in the drive and it did not show up in windows. I had to use gparted to reformat part of the drive, since I had stuff on the other side of the external drive.

 

[indy-pc]

Alright, I'm going to fess up. I'm an idiot. After spending a total of about 5 hours trying to troubleshoot this and figure out what was going on, I finally figured it out. I reinstalled drivers. I reinstalled Windows. I made sure everything was up to date. I tried using USBDeviewer. I booted into Ubuntu 11.04 off of a CD. I tried every USB device I could find in every port on my laptop. Anything and everything I could think of...

In the end?

I was plugging the thumb drives in upside down...

*sigh*

Thanks all for your thoughts, input and help. Feel free to point and laugh, now.

 

[Larry Sabo]

I've done that before, so don't feel badly. For me, it was a PQI retractable flash drive that doesn't have a metal frame surrounding the stub. Easy to do.

 

[roycom]

So the next time someone says "my usb drive a works fine but usb drive b doesn't" what are you going to say to them first?.....

BTW, what about the Seagate 500GB GoFlex? You said it lights up but is not seen in Windows so you must have had at least 1 of possibly 2 usb's in correct.

 

[sassenach]

Not a single tech thought of this one and I bet we've all used RTFM as an answer at sometime in the past.

 

[indy-pc]

BTW, what about the Seagate 500GB GoFlex? You said it lights up but is not seen in Windows so you must have had at least 1 of possibly 2 usb's in correct.

The Seagate is working fine now. I'm not sure why it wasn't working, but it was working fine after I did the N&P. I didn't make any changes to the drive before or after the N&P, so it had to be an issue with Windows. My guess is a corrupted driver.

Thanks all for the encouragement. I was getting so irritated, frustrated and annoyed that I couldn't figure out the issue. I laughed for a good 2 minutes when I finally realized my oversight.

I've been getting smacked in the face with a lot of these "check the basics first" solutions. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a new PSU for an old system that I'm eventually going to turn into a home server. I put it in and hooked it all up and got nothing. I took it back out and hooked it up to my other PC and it worked just fine. So, I put it back in the first system and got nothing again. Baffled, I brought the system over to my desk and used the power cable of my other system (thinking that perhaps I had a bad cable) and it worked fine. So, I moved the system with the new PSU and the known-good cable back to it's original spot, and went to fire it up... nothing. After another hour of head-scratching, I realized that the power strip I was plugging the new PSU into was turned off.

Morale of the story: always check the basics first.