How do you manually mount a USB drive?

[AZBrandon]

For years and years I have used a SanDisk USB card reader to read the memory card for my digital camera. Today, suddenly it will no longer assign it a drive letter on my primary PC. It works fine on my laptop still, so the card reader itself works, but my primary PC will not give it a drive letter. For kicks, I plugged in a USB hard drive, and sure enough, it gives it a drive letter right away, but no matter what USB port I plug it into, my card reader gets nothing.

I have tried stopping the device, disabling, enabling, rebooting, reboot with a hard drive scan, and the results are the same. I don't get it. How can a card reader work fine on one PC, then on the other, it sees the device but won't give it a drive letter?

[NyteOwl]

Have you done any updates on that machine lately that might have produced a conflict? Try looking to see if there is a newer driver for your reader, or perhaps as a last resort uninstall the driver and reinstall the device.

[AZBrandon]

Nothing with drivers, at least. The only software I installed was some crappy HVAC sizing software that didn't actually do anything, and Orthos. Both software products have been uninstalled and removed from the hard drive entirely. The driver associated with the device is still the same generic microsoft driver. To make it even more frustrating, I realized it can see the volume itself just fine, it simply gives no way to assign it a drive letter. See screen capture:



I've tried it with two different memory cards too, same result. My other computer reads them just fine, but this one only sees that the device is present, but refuses to mount it as a drive letter.

[Jokoto]

Can you see or do anything from Disk Management? (Open via Run -> "diskmgmt.msc", for example). It should be shown there, hopefully, and right-clicking it should give you the option to assign a drive letter.

[AZBrandon]

Can you see or do anything from Disk Management? (Open via Run -> "diskmgmt.msc", for example). It should be shown there, hopefully, and right-clicking it should give you the option to assign a drive letter.

Wow, I didn't even know that existed, but sure enough, that did it! I right clicked on the flash drive, clicked on the option to assign a drive letter, and it came right up! I then unplugged it, watched the drive letter go away, plugged it back in and sure enough, it gave it a drive letter automatically this time. THANK YOU!!

[andyb]

Wow, I didn't even know that existed, but sure enough, that did it! I right clicked on the flash drive, clicked on the option to assign a drive letter, and it came right up! I then unplugged it, watched the drive letter go away, plugged it back in and sure enough, it gave it a drive letter automatically this time. THANK YOU!!

Not everyone knows that exists.

A nice little trick I uses often is to manually assign a drive letter that wont be automatically used, XP then uses that drive letter for that USB storage device everytime you plug it in. This is brilliant for backup software as U will always be U.

Remember though that if you have drives C, D, E and you force a device to use F, when you plug in a USB device XP will always give it the next drive letter (F), it will then have a conflict and you wont be able to see one or either of the devices. This also applies to network devices, I have seen people struggling with this one a few times, they have mapped a network drive to F, and then plugged in a USB device which XP is trying to make F and neither end up working.

I often force customers external USB backup drives to be U (for USB), its far enough up the alphabet that it wont be a problem, it will always be U (unless something changes it) regardless of the USB port you use, and people remember U for USB. The only problem with this is that most people (including me) map network drives from Z down, and often end up using U and having the same problem - this is quite minor as most people dont use 6 network drives.

AZ, do you think any of the above might have happened to your drive.???

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On a side note, many people dont realise that they can change any drive letters except A, B and C (providing that they are booting from C), this is useful, if you have C as the boot, D as the optical and then add another HDD which will be E.

You can simply move the optical to S (or anything that is not in use), then move the second HDD to D and then the optical to E. I have done this dozens of times with no ill efect, just remember to re-boot before using either of the newly assigned drives as shortcuts etc etc will not work. The occasional crappy piece of software (that includes some games) wont work in this format, just reverse the process if this is the case, or re-install crappy software.

I hope this is useful.


Andy

[Jokoto]

Just to add one more note here: The more user-friendly way to access disk management and other such things is via right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage. This "Computer Management" contains system event viewers, tools for managing user accounts, disks and services etc. The reason I told you to run the specific .msc directly was to make sure you didn't get lost on the way.

Entering "dir c:\*.msc" in the command prompt will list the names of the rest of these useful tools to run, for examples services.msc for Services. You can run control panel components in the same way; for example joy.cpl for quick access to game controllers.

[KansaKilla]

Thanks, andyb and Jokoto! those are some really great suggestions!

[AZBrandon]

AZ, do you think any of the above might have happened to your drive.???

It's very likely, in fact. I have 3 different external USB drives and this one was (I think) on D, which is where I mapped it again this time, but based on what you're saying, I may put this one out on U: next time I have reason to dig it out of my camera bag again. All good advice indeed!