Plugged in your USB Flash drive but Windows can’t see it?
You’ve probably run into a drive lettering conflict.
Possible Symptoms
- At home, your PC sees your flash drive as drive letter E. (I’m using E as an example)
- You go to work and plug in your USB stick, but it doesn’t show up.
The likely culprit
This is probably because your PC at work already has a Drive E assigned - Windows can’t have two drives with the same drive letter, so your Flash drive can’t be used. To use it, we need to change the drive letter assigned to the flash stick.
How to fix it
- Right click on My Computer.
- Click ‘Manage’.
- Click ‘Disk Management’ in the Left pane.
- Locate your flash stick in the right pane.
- Right click on it, and choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths…’.
- Click either Change or Add, and assign the drive a new letter. (I usually pick something high up the alphabet, like ‘R’)
- Ta-da! Your Flash drive should now appear
Did this help you at all? Any questions? Feel free to leave me a comment below!
21 February, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Tried that first and still isn’t working. Any other suggestions?
25 February, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Hey James,
Without knowing more about the scenario, I can only guess, but one possibility is that your IT department has disabled USB Mass Storage devices, or restricted access to only approved devices. Try checking with them to see
15 November, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Thank you this is exactly what was wrong and what I needed to do.