USB Drive Not Found
It is not uncommon to plug in a USB drive into a computer and the drive does not appear in Windows Explorer as a drive. This is especially true with computers on corporate or other types of administered networks but can happen on any computer.
Why the USB Drive is Not Found
The system assigns drive letters in order. The first drive assigned a letter is the primary hard drive which is the C drive. If the system has a partition or more that one hard drive, they are assigned the D drive, then E and so on.
After hard drives, CD, DVD, ZIP drives are assigned drive letters. Network dives keep their drive letters that are assigned by the network administrator.
The problem is that the operating system does not recognize mapped drives, only physical and logical drives. Physical drives are hard drives, CD, DVD drives, etc. Logical drives are partitions on a hard drive.
Note: It is assumed that the USB drive is found by the computer but not assigning a drive letter. If the USB drive is not found, then there may be a hardware or driver issue.
No that your eyes have glazed over, just remember that the USB drive is being assigned a drive letter that is already assigned to another drive and it is easy to fix.
Find My USB Drive and Assign a Drive Letter
You must have administrator rights to the computer; if not you network administrator will need to change the drive letter assignments.
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.
Watch the video on how to assign a drive letter to a USB drive. Click the film icon.
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.
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December 10th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Lately,I’ve been having zillions of “window-worthy” computer glitches, meaning problems that make me want to throw my computer out the window! This was one of them, so I thank you for this entry. You just saved me from having to buy a new computer . . . and also prevented some innocent passerby from being hit by a flying laptop!
December 11th, 2007 at 7:39 am
A beautiful blog you have here. I had a nice time visiting. Cheers
December 11th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
@BroTee
Welcome to SimplePCTalk.com. Thanks for the comments. Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or email updates at http://www.simplepctalk.com/subscribe-to-simplepctalkcom/.
Jim/pcguy
December 11th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
@Culver
Glad to hear that you solved an issue. It is rewarding when I can help someone with a computer problem. Thanks for visiting and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or email updates at http://www.simplepctalk.com/subscribe-to-simplepctalkcom/.
Thanks,
Jim/pcguy
January 10th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Had this problem with my new PC at work. Thanks to your blog, the problem was easily resolved. Much appreciated!
-Will
January 10th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Will,
Glad to be of some help. Thanks for stopping by Simple PC Talk.com
pcguy
April 21st, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Very professional, Solves my problem.
Thanks
Sam
June 16th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Awesome! It works!
June 20th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
What if “Change Drive Letter and Paths” is grayed out so I cannot select it? My problem is my USB drive no longer is recognized in any PC, though it was a few days ago. In the “Computer Management” window and the “Disk Management” menu item, I see the drive and it has no letter. It says “Healthy (Unknown Partition)”, and it does not know the file system. Can you help?
June 21st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Rod,
If you could use the USB drive a few days ago on the same computer, then your USB drive may be corrupt. But first, try the USB drive on another computer.
If that fails, then it is probably corrupt. Is the USB drive an actual hard drive or a flash drive? If it is an external hard drive, you may be able to recover your data. If it is a flash drive, the data may be gone for good.
Either way, if you want to use the drive and don’t care about the data, just use the Disk Management tools and right click on the drive and create a new partition and format the drive. NOTE: This method will erase any data on the drive.
Hope this helps, if you have any further questions, please ask.
pcguy
July 9th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
i have the same problem, every time i inserted a new external device such as my USB or DVDRW it can’t be seen because it is assigned in drive D. when i check this through disk management and change it to a different letter then it can be read. what I can’t solve is what drive is using drive D. there’s no disk i.e. listed on disk management that uses D:?
July 19th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
[...] My Computer Does Not Recognize My USB Drive [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
The best and most concise solution I found. It worked perfectly.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:07 am
My problem is that Disk Management sees the drive, but cannot assign it a letter. Change Drive Letter and Paths is greyed out and Disk Management shows Healthy(Active), but no drive letter. I do need my data and cannot afford to reformat the drive before I get it off. Short of mailing the drive to a company who can recover the data, do I have any other choices? It is an external hard drive