I have not been able to use any flash drives ever since I did a repair on my Win XP (w/ service pack 2) install. I actually Ghosted my system to a different drive, and then repaired it. I then reinstalled all of the windows updates that I had lost, due to the repair.
Now whenever I plug a flash drive in ( I have used 2 different drives on various ports and hubs on my system)the drive is recognized and installed successfully into the system. It shows up in the device manager, as well as the Disk Management utility. However the drive will not show up in explorer, nor is it given a drive letter in the DM util. I can assign a drive letter to it in DM, but that will not allow me to access it in explorer…even if I type in the direct path to it. I don’t have any mapped drives either.
Now onto the weirdness…which frightens me. After assigning the drive a letter in DM and then right clicking on it (still in DM) and choosing the option to “Explore”, I get an error message which says “The folder ‘O:\’ does not exist.” This isn’t that weird, but then if I right click on it again and do the same thing, it actually opens up explorer, and briefly opens my drive directory (displaying its contents) but then immediately jumps to the “My Documents” directory…leaving the flash drive directory nowhere to be found. However I can press the BACK button in explorer and will bring me to the drive….which actually shows the path to it with the correct drive letter. And I can indeed access the drive. However, if I try to transfer a file to it with a longer file name (probably longer than eight characters) it will not transfer it, and tells me that it not support file names of that length. So I believe that windows is not assigning proper volume information to the drive for some reason….giving me very limited access to it. If I close out of Explorer and DM and then reopen Explorer and type the path in for the drive, I get the ?Cannot find?.?error?, so I essentially cannot access it again unless I go back to DM and tell it to explore. The other possibly interesting bit of information is that I did a transfer speed test of a large file, and I believe that the flash drive is transferring at the faster USB 2.0 speed.
Onto the next weird thing: Every time that I have assigned the flash drive a drive letter in DM, XP remembers this, and so I am getting less and less letters to choose from. Not so weird; but a pain. But if I log out of XP and then log back in, Explorer will show those lettered drives as being present (Regardless of whether the Flash drive is plugged in or not). If I go to explore the drives, I get an error message that says “T:\ refers to a location that is unavailable….” The drives are not displayed in DM.
I don?t have this issue with any other USB devices that I know of. I have tried other USB hard drives (not flash drives) and they work perfectly fine. I have tried uninstalling all of the USB controllers and devices in the device manager and restarting. Windows reinstalls everything automatically and the same problems resume.
I have a dual booting system that has a different windows installation and the flash drive works perfectly on it.
At this point I feel like my XP is just shot and I will have to do a fresh reinstall. But if someone can nail this problem, I’ll be thoroughly impressed.
A great thank you for anyone even reading this entire post.
-L