USB Flash drive not recognized

Have you tried rebooting?  

Is this your computer or work computer?  If work and running XP Pro, it's possible that your IT turned off access to USB Drives.

Yep, tried rebooting

It's a work computer but I'm the IT guy - so I should be okay there  ;-)

you should probably install a driver. Have a look at the site of the manufacturer if they provide them. Or if you still have the packaging,  look if a cd of floppy was provided with it.

try this :
USB no drive letter
delete the following key with regedit and reboot :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Enum USBSTOR

i had a card reader with that symptom before, it turns out that the cable was faulty.  so i replaced the cable and it got fixed.  since you are using a usb thumb drive, i would look at the contact points. If some of the 4 contact points are dirty or something that will not make it contact properly with the terminals then the device will be recognized but it will not be mounted (no drive letter).

and a wild guess...try using in safe mode?

lastly does it work on other computers?

good luck!

>>   and a wild guess...try using in safe mode?    <<  haha - joking?   no drivers loaded . . .
 

did you  check disk  manager ....

maybe de  USB  drive   has  no drive letter  yet ...
 or if  it  has a  drive letter ,  check  you  do not use the same letter  for a  network drive ...
if so  change drive letter   to  a free one ...

in   ""safely  remove  hardware""  do you  see the USB  drive ????

just wondering ...

larkinstreetyouth,

You mentioned that the USB drive is not recognized in disk management.  When you go into Computer management from the Control Panel->Administrative Tools is it listed under Storage->Removable Storage?
And again, OS?

And if you're up for a long read, see this one.  No absolute answer but the troubleshooting is very good.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/20790258/XP-Pro-will-not-recognize-USB-mass-storage-devices.html

The flash drive doesn't show up under Storage -> removable media.  The drive is recognized as a usb removable storage device and shows up under the safely remove hardware menu. There are no errors in event viewer.

As for the suggestion above for deleting a key from regedit, the key wasn't present.

This drive behaves the same way on all computers now.  My guess is that possibly the drive is damaged, but since its recognized, I was hoping I could recover data from the drive.

>>  This drive behaves the same way on all computers now.  My guess is that possibly the drive is damaged,   <<  agreed

Same way on all computers - ouch.  Sounds bad to me too.

So the only place you can see that it is connected is when the balloon pops up and tells you it is ready for use, correct?

You can't see it in the Device Manager, even when using the "View Devices by Connections" view?

What I'm trying to do is find a way that you can either run a scandisk or even Spinrite (needs to boot to Spinrite and be able to see it though) on this disk.

One last thought before we go.   Do you have any Linux Live CD's available?  A live cd will be booted from the CD drive and run only in system memory, not using the existing harddrive but if you have the USB thumbdrive plugged in when you boot to the Live CD, it may be able to read it.  Worth a shot, if you haven't done it yet.  What I would do is unplug any other USB devices not needed, except for maybe 1 other Thumbdrive so you could copy the bad to the good and boot up with it.

I would use Knoppix Live Cd as my test.  http://www.knoppix.org/

larkinstreetyouth,
We have not heard from you. Did any comment help you solve your problem? Do you need any clarification? If an Expert helped you, please accept his/her answer above with an excellent or good grade.


Marc

I think the usb drive is dead. Please close this discussion.

Options for closing questions.  Please see this FAQ,
https://www.experts-exchange.com/help.jsp#hi67