I Can Not Find My USB Drive In Vista.

Posted on June 17, 2008 
Filed Under Vista Tips & Tricks

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Computer Tips, Tricks, Tweaks and Tutorials - I Can Not Find My USB Drive In Vista.

Normally when you insert a USB drive into your computer you should hear a beep/sound and your USB flash drive should automatically appear in the device list of your computer. That is what should happen but sometimes it happens that your USB drive is not showing there. The most common reason that your USB drive isn’t showing is that your system assigns a drive letter to it that already is in use.

 

I couldn’t find my USB Drive and this is what happened to me.

 

This is my device list.

 

Can-not-find-USB-drive-Vista-pic1

 

The first step is to open all your devices; it can happen that all of a sudden your lost USB drive is opened.

 

This was now not the case.

 

If you want to find your USB drive you’ll need to open Vista Computer Management. You can do this with the following steps.

 

  • Go to start
  • Right click on Computer
  • And select Manage

 

Can-not-find-USB-drive-Vista-pic2

 

If you haven’t disabled your User Account Control – UAC, you’ll see a pop-up asking you for permission.

 

  • Now go to Storage and select Disk Management.

 

Can-not-find-USB-drive-Vista-pic3

 

As you can see now my H: disk is a removable 1000MB disk unlike the first picture where my H: disk a 97.6 GB network location was.

 

Now you need to change the drive letter of the USB drive and everything will be back to normal again.

 

  • Right click on the (in this case) H: disk and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
  • Select the drive and click on change.

 

Can-not-find-USB-drive-Vista-pic4

 

Can-not-find-USB-drive-Vista-pic5

 

I assigned the letter I to it and when you then click OK you first get a warning, click OK and your USB drive should now appear again in your list of devices and in most cases the autoplay window will appear.

 

Can-not-find-USB-drive-Vista-pic6

 

Now you know what to do when you can not find your USB Flash drive in Vista.

 

 

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Comments

2 Responses to “I Can Not Find My USB Drive In Vista.”

  1. learning windows on June 24th, 2008 11:37 pm

    VISTA - every noob’s enemy. Thanks for the tip. :-)

  2. Barry Marshall on September 15th, 2008 3:38 pm

    Hi Vincent. Here is a curly one for you.
    I have an 8GB Lexar USB drive in which half the space just disappears! Duing the night, Norton360 tries to backup to the spare 4GB of the drive. In the morning I see the files there but they don’t add up to more than about 4GB. Even so, the drive is full! I delete the Norton backup files and it makes little difference. So where did the space go?
    I even showed hidden files and system files but still don’t see all the contents. Manage shows a FAT32 drive quite normally.
    Here is a directory list for the drive.
    Go to it Guru!

    Volume in drive E is LEXARA_8GB
    Volume Serial Number is A07E-E633

    Directory of E:\

    06/05/2008 11:35 PM NTBArchives
    09/11/2006 09:30 PM 24,576 LxrAutoRun.exx
    09/11/2006 09:32 PM 28,672 LxrUnplug.exx
    16/03/2007 03:08 AM 86,803 NoTouchBackup.chm
    16/03/2007 03:06 AM 97,054 NoTouchBackup_QSG.pdf
    16/03/2007 01:45 AM 3,899,392 NoTouchBkup.exe
    15/09/2008 02:07 PM 3,628,073,472 ReadyBoost.sfcache
    6 File(s) 3,632,209,969 bytes

    Directory of E:\NTBArchives

    13/09/2008 07:09 PM .
    13/09/2008 07:09 PM ..
    06/05/2008 11:17 PM 770,048 NTBackupInfo.dat
    1 File(s) 770,048 bytes

    Total Files Listed:
    7 File(s) 3,632,980,017 bytes
    3 Dir(s) 84,500,480 bytes free

    Volume in drive C has no label.
    Volume Serial Number is 3E0C-302C
    Volume in drive E is LEXARA_8GB
    Volume Serial Number is A07E-E633

    Directory of E:\

    06/05/2008 11:35 PM NTBArchives
    09/11/2006 09:30 PM 24,576 LxrAutoRun.exx
    09/11/2006 09:32 PM 28,672 LxrUnplug.exx
    16/03/2007 03:08 AM 86,803 NoTouchBackup.chm
    16/03/2007 03:06 AM 97,054 NoTouchBackup_QSG.pdf
    16/03/2007 01:45 AM 3,899,392 NoTouchBkup.exe
    15/09/2008 02:07 PM 3,628,073,472 ReadyBoost.sfcache
    6 File(s) 3,632,209,969 bytes

    Directory of E:\NTBArchives

    13/09/2008 07:09 PM .
    13/09/2008 07:09 PM ..
    0 File(s) 0 bytes

    Total Files Listed:
    6 File(s) 3,632,209,969 bytes
    3 Dir(s) 84,500,480 bytes free

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