Find Your Missing USB Drive in Windows XP

Posted by Anonymous  |  at  14:45 No comments

Have you ever plugged in a USB drive or any external device with a hard drive and wondered why you cannot see it in My Computer?More than likely the cause is that Windows renamed the drive to a letter that is already in use. This will happen if you have several card readers, thumb drives or external hard drives attached. It will also happen if you are on a network and have mapped drives.To find the drive and then rename it, you’ll want to right-click on My Computer and select Manage.

• From the Computer Management screen, select Disk Management.

• In this window you should see all of your connected physical drives, their format, if they are healthy, and the drive letter.

• In this instance I am going to change the drive letter of my Lexar USB drive. Right-click on the drive in the list, and from the resulting menu select “Change Drive Letters and Paths…”

• Click on Change so we can change the drive letter. You might notice that you can select Add, which would let you mount the drive into a folder if you wanted to. We don’t want to, so just click Change.

• Select a new drive letter from the drop down list, preferably the one that you usually use for this drive.

• Click Yes on the confirmation screen and you are done

• If you have auto play enabled, you will get the normal pop up dialog asking what you want to do.