Flash Drive or External Hard Drive Won’t Show

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to our feed.

Here’s an interesting little interaction between a couple of issues.  Sometimes users can experience a flash drive or external drive not showing when plugged in.  There are a number of issues that can cause this problem.  Here is one such scenario.  Let’s suppose that you like to map drives to drive letters.  One such case may be that you are using shared drives on another computer.  You are getting sick of searching for them on the network and so you decide to map them.  This is a pretty easy process.  You right click on the start button (or the windows button in Vista) and select “explore.”  This brings up a listing of all your drives and files.  Now, to map a network drive, you simply go to “Tools” at the top and then “Map Network Drive.”  The “directions” on the pop up screen tell you to fashion the folder of the shared drive like “Example: \\server\share.”  That can be confusing.

What that means is that you need the computer name of the machine that houses the share.  You find that in the Control Panel.  Go to “System.”  Go to the tab “Computer Name.”  So, if the computer, named “paul” has a share named “shared folder,” then you would enter it into the “Map Network Drive” area as \\paul\shared folder.  Make sense?  Anyway, sometimes people have a gazillion mapped drives.  Or, they make the mistake of mapping drives earlier in the alphabet, like f:.  You should always start mapping drives at z:.  And this is one reason why.

Let’s suppose that you map a network drive to f:.  You already have drives at a:(floppy drive), c:(hard drive), d:(second internal hard drive), e:(third internal drive), and f:(a mapped shared drive you just mapped).  Now, what will happen when you plug in your flash drive?  Well, you would think that it would grab letter g:.  But, in my experience, you would be wrong.  Many times I have seen the flash drive attempt to grab letter f:, even though a share is mapped to f:.  In any case, the solution is to disconnect the network drive f: and remap it at z: or something else high in the alphabet.  Now, when you plug your flash drive or external drive in, it will show up in your drive listings.

As an aside, sometimes a drive or flash drive won’t show because of a corrupt file system.  This is especially true for flash drives.  You simply have to reformat the drive again to allow it to be seen.  The easiest way to do that, if i remember correctly, is to use the computer management tool in adminstative tools.  You can find it in the control panel, under administrative tools.  In the computer management tool you will disk managment (on the left hand side).  If you click on that, the messed up flash drive should show in the drive listings as unpartitioned space or something.  Right click the drive and select “format.”  I would format it as FAT.

Digg it Add to del.icio.us Stumble it add to technorati


Related Posts:

Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure
If the headline above made you cringe, you know how I felt earlier this evening. When I got home from...

Retrofitted Laptop Flash Drive Mod
I keep my eyes on solid state drives.  I would love to have a solid state laptop running linux.  If...

Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive Dock
A hard drive dock makes storage easier.  That because storage demands have gone sky high.  And those demands are increasing...

SanDisk 35GB Flash Hard Drive
Solid state memory technology has been around a long time. The problem is that the price has kept it...

Hard Drive Bios Settings
One of the more confusing things users run into are hard drive bios problems.  Whether it is updating the bios,...

•