Same old USB problem but I've forgotten the solution
 

Turned PC on after some internal work, two USB connected drives not recognised. Had the same problem about a year ago, dimly remember it was easily solved but no idea what the solution was ! Help !

Unplug reboot plug in.

No?

Put the disc in, let it find the drivers...

...er, one of those unrecognised drives was the disc drive??? Uh-oh. :{

We assume you are talking Windows? Which version?

Shut down REMOVE power completely (as above UNPLUG) reboot. If that no fix, Google for registry hacks.

Win 7 has a funny bug you can use USBDEVIEW to uninstall the device driver which usually fixes
View any installed/connected USB device on your system

WIN-XP, SP III. Good news is after six hours I fixed the problem. Bad news is I can't help anyone else as don't know which of many things I did was successful.

Memo to self: what a truly piece of crap software WIN uses for allocating letters & etc to its removable drives.

In my ideal world:

You'd plug a drive in.
WIN look for an ID tag on the drive, if not found would allocate an ID tag (letter ?) on the screen and also - v. important - write the tag onto the drive.

You'd plug the drive in the next time.
WIN look for an ID tag on the drive, find it, think "we've been here before" and allocate the same id tag/letter on the screen.

Far too simple.

Ah yes, but can you remember which USB port you plugged it into...?

SD

Tip

if you want USB hard drives to be found by Plug N Pray, always plug them in BEFORE powering them up

As for what you'd forgotten.....was it USBDeview?
View any installed/connected USB device on your system

I once had a computer with a SATA HDD, floppy dive, CD and DVD burners and a front mounted, internal USB connected multi card reader.

On a clean OS reinstall it allocated the floppy as A, card reader as C, HDD as D and burners as E and F.

As most software wants to install to C, and some not giving a choice, I had to unplug the card reader and start all over again.

:{

suffered that several times....

actually thats quite a good general tip - leave USB card readers unplugged during installation and only plug them in once you've got the OS up and running
more of a problem with SATA drives than good old fashioned IDE ones, where the drive letters were pretty much hard wired

No need, simply right click on my computer, manage, and change the drive letters to what you need.

You could unplug all USB devices, go to device manager and uninstall everything to do with USB. Reboot and plug in the devices one by one.

That usually works for me.

No need, simply right click on my computer, manage, and change the drive letters to what you need.

That wasn't my problem !


View any installed/connected USB device on your system

Milo, thanks for that tip, this brilliant piece of s/w is now sitting in a folder on my desktop ready for next time. Everyone on this thread - look no further.

"No need, simply right click on my computer, manage, and change the drive letters to what you need"


You can't change the letters of the boot or system partitions