Jan
26
2008

USB Drive not showing in MY COMPUTER on Windows Vista computer

USB and VISTA logo

If your USB flash drives aren’t showing up in MY COMPUTER, I may have the solution for you. I was having the same problem with my laptop (this solution applies to those of you running Windows Vista), I would plug my usb flash drives into my usb slots, but nothing would happen. I could not get them to show up in MY COMPUTER. The solution to this problem that worked for me is as follows:

Once you’ve plugged your USB flash drive into your computer or laptop click on the WINDOWS LOGO on your task bar. This will bring up the START MENU. In the START SEARCH field type in “manage” (without the quotes). From the results that display click on COMPUTER MANAGEMENT. When the “WINDOWS NEEDS YOUR PERMISSION TO CONTINUE” message appears, just click on CONTINUE. The Computer Management program will now appear.

From the left side items you want to click on DISK MANAGEMENT. Once you click on it the Middle Pane will display all drives attached to your system. Your USB flash drive should be listed here. In the bottom half of the pane it will be listed as REMOVABLE. What you want to do is click on the USB drive in the top section of the middle pane. Once it is selected go to the right pane and click on MORE ACTIONS, and then select ALL TASKS, and then CHANGE DRIVE LETTER AND PATHS. From here a new window will appear. It will say “ALLOW ACCESS TO THIS VOLUME BY USING THE FOLLOWING DRIVE LETTER AND PATHS:”, there should be nothing in the white area below this text, the reason for this is because your computer was not able to assign a drive letter to the USB drive, and thus it wasn’t able to appear in MY COMPUTER. What you want to do now is click the ADD button. You can now type in the drive letter that you want windows to assign to your USB drive. Anything from N and above would be a safe bet. Once you’ve put the drive letter in click on OK, and then OK again.

And that should be it. Your USB drive should be recognized in MY COMPUTER now, as well as any others that you plug in from this point forward.

Happy computing..

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January 26, 2008 by Jonesy in Computing | 56 Comments »

56 Responses to “USB Drive not showing in MY COMPUTER on Windows Vista computer”



  1. pat tweddle Says:

    Hi Jonesy

    I have a 2 Formac Drives – first behaves as expected, went into did exactly as described above and all was well. However second drive is not seen in Device manager, or as a Disk under Disk management it is like it isn’t seen at all. It powers up, led lights up but nothing else. tried swopping the cables but nothing. Any suggestions ?

    Thanks




  2. Jonesy Says:

    Pat. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, time off and getting sick have kept me away from my blogging duties.

    Have you tried plugging the second drive in without the first being plugged in as well? (Just wondering if there is a conflict only when two similar drives are plugged in at the same time?)

    cheers,
    Jonesy.

    p.s. congrats on being the first person to ever post a comment on my blog!! Thanks. =)




  3. Mark Bonnet Says:

    Thanks so much, I’m not an idiot with PCs, but Vista changed a lot of unwritten rules. Worked a treat.

    Oh, I had to disconnect about five or six, network drives that had been mapped, but not in general use.

    Well done Jonsey




  4. Jonesy Says:

    Mark B.,

    I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know that my post helped you out.

    Thanks,

    Jonesy




  5. Dave Says:

    This worked great. Thanks a bunch.




  6. Jonesy Says:

    My pleasure Dave.




  7. Peter Says:

    Worked great, thanks for the help and accurate solution.




  8. Jonesy Says:

    Great to hear Peter. Cheers.




  9. Oren Says:

    Thanks for the advice. Whenever I click on CHANGE DRIVE LETTER AND PATHS, I get

    “The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date”

    then it tells me to refresh or restart Disk Management or reboot if I have a problem, but those things don’t work. Any thoughts?

    Thanks ahead of time.




  10. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Oren,

    Thanks for sharing your predicament with me; you’ve definitely come up with a pretty tricky one. There doesn’t seem to be many resources online that can help shed light on your present situation, as I am sure you are aware. So all I can do at this point is try and offer up some other suggestions that might help get you to where you need to be.

    • Do you have the latest Vista updates?
    • I took a quick look at my Computer Management window and it is version Management Console 3.0, Version 6.0 (Build6001: Service Pack 01) – just putting that out there in case it amounts to something. =)
    • Have you defrag this drive yet? Or at least run a check on it to see if there are any problems with the drive?

    Sorry I haven’t been much help yet Oren. I will keep scouring the net to see if I can find anything that might prove fruitful.

    Keep me posted if you reach a solution as well.

    Cheers,
    Jonesy




  11. Brian Says:

    I have the same problem with my USB on my VISTA64 box. It had been working fine for several months then suddenly stopped showing up in explorer. The drive still works just fine on other XP Pro machines. It appears in disk management on VISTA64 without the drive letter, and cannot be accessed/changed. I tried to clean the registry of the device references, but that didn’t help either. Some keys/data could not be deleted. If you come up with anything please post it. I used the drive for transferring large files and now it doesn’t work. Bummer.




  12. Jonesy Says:

    Thanks for the input Brian. You had mentioned that “some keys/data could not be deleted”, what about formatting the drive? If you don’t need any of the existing data, I am wondering if wiping it clean with a format would allow it to then be recognized on your machine. Just a thought.

    Jonesy




  13. Brian Says:

    It will not format on VISTA because you cannot get past the error messages about an “unexpected error”. I check the system event log as the message suggests and there is not an event listed associated with the incident. Really strange. I also reformatted the USB stick on one of my XP machines and VISTA still does not recognize it. I tried to set it up as a device in a virtual machine, but needless to say since VISTA won’t recognize it properly neither will the virtual machines. I’m going to go to MSDN and see if I can find help.

    BTW – I had an old 1gig USB 2.0 stick that I gave to my wife and VISTA recognized it. Go figure. Something has been set wrong somewhere (i.e. corrupted) on the stick I am having problems with. It is probably a registry problem.




  14. Jonesy Says:

    Hmmm, that is definitely a strange situation, especially with you indicating that you formatted it on an XP machine and your VISTA still doesn’t recognize it. Have you tried connecting it in safe mode? (and I apologize if you have done these things already, I am just thinking out loud here) Is it a SanMicro Cruzer? I have had some big problems with those in the past, so I steer clear of them.

    Please post the solution if you come up with anything during your MSDN travels.

    Thanks again Brian.

    Jonesy




  15. Adam Says:

    This was a big help! I was able to talk my sister through setting up her new drive over the phone with this info. XP was so easy, why MS decided to make so many changes is beyond me.




  16. Jonesy Says:

    Thanks for the comment Adam. I’m glad that I was able to help. I think an unwritten Core Value of Microsoft is: let’s always release something that doesn’t play nicely with others and will definitely aggravate and annoy the hell out of a large percentage of the computing population. As a web designer Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the bane of my existence, all the other web browsers get along quite well and handle things pretty much the same way, Mircosoft on the other hand, well, I picture them as the little boy standing in the middle of the playground with his fingers in his ears and his eyes closed tightly, saying “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me!”. Maybe one day the eyes will open and the fingers will come out. Maybe. =)




  17. Guna Pathakkam Says:

    Hi

    Thanks for your information on USB drive not showing in Vista. However, I would like to point out that I did all the steps that you described but I noticed that under “Computer Management” I did not see the “removal disk”. Interestingly, upon clicking the “Device Manager”, I selected the “portable devices” and noticed an exclamation mark with following message under “device status” section upon doubl clicking.

    “Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)

    Click ‘Check for solutions’ to send data about this device to Microsoft and to see if there is a solution available.”

    In order to resolve this I did the following:

    a. Uninstall the driver.
    b. Disconnnected my portable device (Sansa 4GB drive).
    c. Reconnected the portable device, then Vista automatically detected and installed the drive.

    After this I could access the portable device from explorer.

    Anyway thanks for your input. Hope this might help some others.




  18. Laura Says:

    I LOVE U. I looked for a solution forever, thankfully I found your blog.




  19. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Laura,

    I appreciate the Love. =) And I am glad my blog was able to help you.

    Jonesy




  20. Peter Says:

    Thanks for the directions! It solved my problem. I can’t believe MS changed this from XP. You never needed to assign drive letters in XP, it always just grabbed the next available one.

    When I searched for “vista formatted drive not seen in computer” in Google, your blog came up fourth from the top. So I guess it’s getting a lot of hits out there…




  21. Jonesy Says:

    Glad I was able to help, you can always count on MS to take out something that was working quite fine. =)

    And yup, this post has definitely picked up and established itself regarding this particular vista problem; it is great to see.

    Have a good one,
    Jonesy




  22. Sam Says:

    I have an external hard drive though when i plug it in it does not show up in disk management nor my computer even when its the only usb device plugged in please help




  23. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Sam,

    Hmmmm. Did your external drive come with any installation disks? The drive may require a driver to be installed so that your computer can recognize it. Also, you may want to take a look in CONTROL PANEL > SYSTEM AND MAINTENANCE > SYSTEM > DEVICE MANAGER – you want to see if there are any exclamation marks icons beside any USB controllers or devices. THis would indicate that your computer has an issue with that, or those, particular items. From there you could uninstall or update the driver for that particular item and see if that does the trick.

    Good luck. Let me know if you make any progress (and sorry for the delay in getting back to you)

    Jonesy




  24. Brian Says:

    Hi there Jonesy,

    I look in the computer management part and it says that my disk is unallocated space. It was an unformatted drive from my Playstation 3 which i got an enclosure for.

    Any ideas on what to do?




  25. Jonesy Says:

    First of all I want to thank Brian for taking the time to read my blog and post a comment. I was unable to post a reply to his message via the web so I sent him a quick response via email.

    I mentioned to Brian that his drive would have to be formatted in order for it to work. He had replied a while later stating “I managed to get it working with a little bit of perseverance. I needed to initialize the hard drive first, then assign a drive letter, then reformat it. Bit complicated but got it working. Surprised Vista isn’t designed automatically to do that. Thanks again for your suggestion by the way.” Your welcome Brian. I am glad you were able to get everything up and running. And yes, I agree you would think that Vista would be able to at least alert the user that those would be the required steps to get the drive working and if you wanted to proceed and allow Vista to do that for you. Silly us eh?

    Cheers,
    Jonesy




  26. Joy Says:

    Hi – When I right click on the USB drive, CHANGE DRIVE LETTER AND PATHS is greyed out, so I don’t have the option to click on it and assign the drive letter. Can you help?!




  27. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Joy,

    Hmmmm, are you logged in as the Administrator? Or does your Vista User Account have Admin priviledges? If not that could be the culprit. Also, does the flash drive you are using have somesort of locking mechanism? Some drives have a little device on the side that slides or clicks in place to lock the drive so that data can’t be written to or deleted from the drive. That too could be the problem.

    Let me know if that helped.

    Jonesy




  28. Joy Says:

    Hi Jonesy,

    There doesn’t seem to be a write protect switch on my WP Passport external HD. Also, it appears that my user account is set up as administrator, though sometimes, like now, I’m not sure all is correct with the user accounts. That’s a long story though. Anyway, I’ll work on figureing out if my user accounts are right first b/c that does seem like a good guess about admin privledges to me. Thanks for trying!




  29. Jonesy Says:

    No problem. Let me know how everything goes; please and thank you. =)

    Jonesy




  30. Kevin Says:

    Hi,

    I tried your advice but got the same error message as Oren (“The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date”). Interestingly, the first time I plugged my USB drive into the laptop, it showed up no problem. When I went to “Safely Remove Hardware”, the computer just showed the spinning circle. I finally gave up waiting and pulled out the USB drive. The computer then would not shut down properly (hung up indefinitely until I held down the power button). The exact same thing happened with a second USB drive. Now the laptop will recognize neither (but will still happily recognize other people’s drives without hanging up). Incidentally, both USB drives had first been used to transfer files off a Mac.

    Does this shed any light, or does it just murkify the problem?




  31. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Kevin,
    Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I was waiting on a response from Oren to see if he ever had any luck with his problem but I still haven’t heard back from him. So needless to say I am at a loss for providing you with any resolution. That being said, have you tried uninstalling your USB drivers and then rebooting to force windows to reinstall them? This could be achieved in CONTROL PANEL > SYSTEM AND MAINTENANCE > SYSTEM > DEVICE MANAGER and then from there you can select your USB controllers to uninstall them.
    That may, or may not, do the trick.

    If I do hear back from Oren I will let you know as soon as I do.




  32. gareth Says:

    Hiya. I need help please!
    Im not brilliant on computers but know abit and I see that you help lots of people so you seem like the man to ask.
    Ive been trying to format my ps3 60gb hdd on my laptop using windows vista basic, computer management and then clicking on disk management. It is recognising the hdd through the usb and after I initialise it, I then right click on the drive and select new simple volume which takes me to the new simple volume wizard. Upon clicking next i select the volume size (I keep it the same). I then press next and assign the drive letter to (f) and continue. I select ‘format this volume’ with the following settings – file system: NTFS. I leave the allocation unit size as default, lable it as ps3 then continue and select finish. The drive tells me it is formatting 55.89gb for about five minutes then it just disappears. Some times it tells me the console view is not up to date and to refresh or reboot. This doesnt work and my windows vista is all up to date. I have also tried to reform it in fat32 in small 320gb volumes but still no luck.
    What can I do next? The drive has hardly been used and will not reformat on the playstation it formats to 14% then stops. This is why I am trying to do it on my laptop. I have searched for hours and cant find out why this is happening. Please help its stressing me out. Thank you. gareth.




  33. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Gareth,

    sorry to hear about your current situation, it definitely seems like an aggravating one.
    A few things come to mind based on your explanation.
    1) it could be the harddrive itself. Snce you have tried a few times to format it and it always gets stuck or hung up at a particular point in the process, there could be a bad sector on the drive. If this is thecase are you able to get Sony to provide you with a replacement?
    2) if it isn’t a hardware issue then it could be a software issue, more specifically a windows issue. Have you tried doing the format in SAFEMODE? If you haven’t then give it a shot and see what happens

    M thoughts are leaning more towards the faulty hardware side than the software side. But that’s just me.

    Please keep us posted.
    Jonesy




  34. gareth Says:

    Hiya,

    Thanks for getting back to me so fast.
    Ive looked into Sony repairing it and it would cost £150 with handling if I sent it to them. Abit much as a new HDD is £30 or so. I tried formatting the drive in safe mode but still had no luck. I think your right, it must be the hardware. Do you know of any software I can download to scan the drive and try to repair the bad sectors that are compatable with Vista? i looked into the hdd manufacters diagnostics downloads but they are all for windows xp, 2000, 98 etc not vista. I cant use the windows tools because i cant see the drive in ‘computer’ till i format it. Guess ill just have to buy a new hdd. Hard times.
    Thank you for your help.
    Gareth.




  35. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Gareth,

    Ouch on the price tag for getting the disk repaired. You gotta love how it will cost way more to repair it than to just buy a brand new one. =) To check for the disk errors you should still be able to do that in Vista. If you follow the original directions of this post on how to get into the COMPUTER MANAGEMENT -> DISK MANAGEMENT area, in there you should hopefully still see your harddrive. Left click once on that drive to highlight/select it and then right click on it and select PROPERTIES. The box that will appear will have a bunch of different tabs, you want to select TOOLS. Once that tab is active you should see a section that refers to ERROR CHECKING, and a button that will allow you to check your HD for errors.

    If you can’t see your HD in the COMPUTER MANAGEMENT -> DISK MANAGEMENT area then you would need to find a third party piece of software, as you had mentioned in your response. Some of the big players in this area are DISKKEEPER or ACRONIS, these are both consumer products that require you to pay for their usage. You could search for an open source equivalent to those two and see what comes up. You may also want to look for a command line program that could check your disk, this is something that would run outside of windows. That may prove fruitful as well.

    Good luck my friend, keep me posted.

    Jonesy




  36. Vose Says:

    Hi Jonesy,

    I had same problem as Orian and Keven,

    It is a “lacie” external HDD. I by mistake removed it from a Mac before it finished ejecting it.

    Then it would not let me assign a drive letter to it. (It continued to work on A XP system and Mac)

    I found this:
    http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-windows-vista-file-management/276516-disk-management-console-view-not-up-date.html

    I tried it but did not work. Then I tried using the clean command. That deleted the master boot table or something like that and it seemed like I lost everything because it was asking to format the disk. So after hours of working I found something that fixed “undeleted” the clean command. A freeware program that is caled “testdisk”.

    Then the HHD was recognized in vista and the problem fixed. I do not recommend this fix because it is risky and round about.

    Not sure what that means but there you go.

    Vose




  37. Jonesy Says:

    Vose,

    wow, thank you so much for your response. It is great to see some more info regarding this particular issue. I appreciate the warning regarding your solution and agree that it is definitely on the risky side. That being said, it is a solution none the less and much better than no solution: Use At Your Own Risk people.

    If anyone has a more “risk free” solution to this particular problem we would love to hear it.

    Jonesy




  38. gareth Says:

    Hiya.
    Cheers for all you help ill give it a go.
    Thanks again!




  39. Jonesy Says:

    No problem Gareth. Good luck.




  40. Anthony Says:

    Thanks! worked exactly like you described. Tried to end processes through ctrl-alt-delete and msconfig in safe mode but nothing helped. THANKS!




  41. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Anthony,

    Glad to hear that it worked out for you.

    Jonesy




  42. Michael Says:

    I have Vista 32 on a laptop with an external Maxtor One-Touch 4 external drive (F). I try and faithfully use the “safely remove” feature before disconnectng that drive. But sometimes when I plug it back in my computer does not see it. The rive light is ON. And I plugged it’s USB cable in while the CPU was shut down (the correct procedure). I can get it recognized if I keep fiddling with shutting down and restarting – but wat a pain. Isn’t there some other way to get the CPU to scan for external drives? (like there was in my old SCSI drive days) Or is ther someting else I shouldd try.




  43. PC Arbor Says:

    Interesting.

    Times are a changing.

    I like XP but it can be tough to fix sometimes. (But it is still easier for me to understand than NT!)

    Thanks for posting.




  44. Jonesy Says:

    Hi Michael,

    Thanks for the taking the time to read the post and respond with your own question. In this post I mention the DISK MANAGEMENT area within VISTA. This should tell you what removable drives are currently attached to your computer.

    That being said, I also did some searching myself so that I could provide a bit more comprehensive an answer, and I came across this sweet little piece of freeware: USBDeview – it is from a company called NirSoft and it is a simply little program that shows all current connected USB drives, as well as drives that have been connected in the past. From here you can disable, uninstall, etc. I would definitely say give this program a try and see if it helps you.

    Cheers,
    Jonesy




  45. someone Says:

    when I plug in my USB drives, some autoplay, some don’t, in fact those that don’t never even show up in my computer or in disk management. but the “safely remove hardware” icon still comes on.
    i used the USBDeview you mentioned, and it detects that all the drives are connected. but why don’t they show up in my computer? I think there’s something wrong with the drive naming, because sometimes one of my usb drives shows up in under the drive letter of my network drive!




  46. Mark Ingle Says:

    this is exactly the same issue I got, the flash drive not showing up and then when I disconnected the other drives they still showed up on my computer…and the pictures on it…until you tried to view the pictures that is…

    Many reboots later am trying again…seems like vista can get its knickers in a twist sometimes




  47. jonathan Says:

    Works well with my Vista Business SP2. Many thanks.




  48. Jonesy Says:

    Glad to hear it Jonathan.

    All the best,
    Jonesy




  49. Mahvish Says:

    Hey there is nothing in my middle pane and the device is connected.




  50. kobes Says:

    my toshiba 320GB external HD suddenly quit being recognized in explorer on my Vista laptop and my XP desktop. It appears in disk management as “unallocated” I want to get data off it before I try to reformat, any suggestions?




  51. Mark Vice Says:

    I love it!




  52. sara Says:

    ok well i bought my laptop les than a year ago and it was workin awosoem until one day it didnt detect any usbs i tried everything you have told the other people and it wen m at computer management it doesnt how my usb at all ! and at the bottom there is like two squeares one says unlocated but u cant clik on it and the other one says primamy partition




  53. Jonesy Says:

    hmmmm, interesting. The squares referring to “unallocated” and “primary partition” are related to your Hard Drive, not your USB. And you are saying that you do not see anything that refers to “removable disk” (assuming of course that you do have your USB drive connected to your laptop when you are looking in the DRIVE MANAGEMENT section). If that is the case I am wondering if it is a problem with your USB drivers, or even the USB ports themselves? A few deduction methods to try out:
    - have you tried plugging your USB drive into another computer to see it the drive is functional?
    - are you able to connect a USB device (such as a mouse or web cam) to your laptop, and does it work? If it does then it wouldn’t be a problem with the USB port, but the USB Drive.
    - If you go into DEVICE MANAGER (this can be accessed via the CONTROL PANEL), do you see any exclamation marks? If so, what are they referring to?

    Cheers,
    Jonesy




  54. Roy Says:

    Hello Jonesy
    I have a toshiba satelite pro running vista ultimate 32 bit…

    The problem i’m having is i have a internal drive (maxtor 160 diamond 9 drive) in a smart drive external case and when i plug it in to usb port vista installs.. sunplus USB2SATA bridge usb driver with generic volume (k:) as drive letter
    Main volume being (c:) drive(healthy)
    But i cannot get in to drive (K) to do anything with it ..

    Computer management (disc management)shows the drives
    (C:) Disc 0 online

    (K:) disk 1 removable no media..in the box at the bottom but not in the main box at the top !

    I know the drive is ok as i plugged it in to another pc and managed to instal xp onit and ran it fine (then formatted drive)after ..

    I removed drivers from vista machine and plugged it in and it installed the same sunplus drivers and still not able to access the drive

    I have tried different drive letters and nothing seams to work !
    In device manager it shows as Usb Mass storage device and “This device is working properly”
    but under volumes it says

    Disc 1
    Type removable
    Status no media
    partition not applicable
    capacity 0 mb
    unallocated space 0 mb
    reserved space 0 mb

    Volumes:
    ————————————–
    volume (blank) capacity (picture of drive) 0 mb
    ————————————–

    Any help would be greatly appreciated
    Thanks Roy




  55. Anonymous Says:

    Ah, that worked like a charm. I had one flash drive my computer never recognized and since I am not exactly great with computers (always worried I might “break” something the moment I see the question “Are you sure you want to continue?”) this step-by-step solution really helped me. Thanks so much for sharing.




  56. Iain Munro Says:

    Morning

    Yesterday I plugged my USB drive into my Mac as normal, I then go to VM Fusion to attach my USB Drive as normal and copy files from Windows to it. During the process, I got a dialog box that came up and said, do you want to attach to the Mac or Windows. I hit Mac.

    Now I cannot see my drive in either the Mac or PC.

    When I attach to another PC, I know it is being recognised, it is just not being displayed in explorer.

    I tried everything you suggested, but I dont get the options.

    Any ideas?

    Iain


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