USB Flash drive not appearing in My Computer or Windows Explorer

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LFPJK - 29 Jan 2008 03:47 GMT

Whenever I plug a USB flash drive into Windows XP, it does not appear in My
Computer or Explorer.

Here are the symptoms so far:
1. It appears in Disk Management and is assigned a drive letter that does
not conflict with any other drive letter on the system.
2. The drive letter does not appear in My computer or Explorer.
3. If I type in the drive letter in the address bar, I get the following
message: Cannot find file:///u:/'. Make dure the path or Internet address
is correct.
4. If I right-click on the drive letter in Disk Management and choose Open,
it opens a window that lists the drive letter at the top of the window, but
the address bar is blank.
5. If I right-click on the drive letter in Disk Management and choose
Explore, it opens the window briefly before reverting to My computer. If I
click back, I am brought to the window described in 4.
6. The following Microsoft KB articles have been tried and have not helped:
297694, 925106
7. The solutions described on the following websites have been tried and
have not helped:
http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/windows-xp/31147-usb-removable-memory
-not-accessible-explorer-given-drive-letter.html
http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/41478-usb-k
ey-disks-not-showing-up-under-explorer-sp2-patch-problem.html
8. The following software on the system has been removed without solving the
problem: ALL CD/DVD burning software, all virus scan and security software,
all dvd players.

Please help!

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smlunatick - 29 Jan 2008 21:44 GMT

> Whenever I plug a USB flash drive into Windows XP, it does not appear in My
> Computer or Explorer.
[quoted text clipped - 21 lines]
>
> Please help!

You can try to install Powertoys for XP' TweakUI. Under the "My
Computer" section, you can tell "your" XP which drives to show / hide
in Explorer.

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LFPJK - 29 Jan 2008 22:33 GMT

TweakUI did not help this problem.

But I did find a solution:
New symptom found: The USB drive was visible when the computer was in safe
mode.

Solution:
At this point I had to assume that there was some process running on the
computer that was interfering with the USB Drive, so I took the following
steps:

1. In safe mode, I hit cntrl-alt-del and viewed the running processes.
Since the USB drive was working, I wrote down the running processes as a
"safe list." The safe list were the processes that did not prevent the USB
drive from appearing in My Computer and Explorer.
2. Reboot the machine normally.
3. Plug in the USB drive. Hit cntrl-alt-del and view the running processes.
Now there are many more processes running than before, but many can be ruled
out be already being on the safe list. Make a list of the remaining
processes. I am going to call this list "unknown process."
4. Since I had already determined that the CD/DVD burning software, virus
scan, security software, and dvd players were not the culprits, I stopped
the software, noted which processes disappeared from the process table then
moved the process from the unknown list to the safe list. If you are trying
to solve this on your own computer, you will want to verify that these
programs are not the culprits before moving them to the safe list. After you
stop each program, you can verify by unplugging then plugging in the usb
drive to see if the problem continues.
6. I then continued by going to the task bar and stopped a single program,
noted which process disappeared from the table, and uplugged then plugged in
the USB drive to see if it works. If it did not work, I repeated this
process on the next item running in the task bar.
7. My problem happened to be the process apdproxy.exe, which is the photo
downloader for Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition, but rundll32.exe was
the problem for the folks at:
http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/126083.html
8. I then prevented this process from starting with the computer by
removing the line about that process from this location in the registry
HKLM->Software->Microsoft->Windows->CurrentVersion->Run. FYI: CHANGE YOUR
REGISTRY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I hope this helps someone from struggling with this problem for as long as I
have.

Good Luck!

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mercinaman - 24 May 2008 09:37 GMT

I had the same problem on my Vista PC.

Normal boot up USB Flashdrive is recognised, comes up in my computer
but when i try to view the files on it i can't system hangs, can't view
in explorer.

If i do the same thing in Safemode i can access the USB flashdrive with
no problems.

I found out my culprit was ZoneAlarm and its true vector service
(vsmon.exe)

so boot up normally, shut down zone alarm, plug in usb device and it
can be access OK, start up zone alarm and i can still access it.

But if i have zone alarm running before i plug in the usb device, thats
when all the trouble starts.

hope this solution can help some others also

Signature

mercinaman

http://forums.techarena.in

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Kayman - 24 May 2008 11:14 GMT

> I had the same problem on my Vista PC.
>
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
>
> hope this solution can help some others also

The *best* solution is to uninstall ZA (yuck) completely and
activate/utilize the in-build application!

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