Why doesn’t windows explorer show my removable / USB drive even though the command prompt does?

Posted by Gishu on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Gishu
Published on 2009-08-04T05:49:19Z Indexed on 2012/12/16 5:08 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 610

I'm running WinXP SP2. Around 50% of the time, when I slot in my USB drive. Windows explorer refuses to show the drive.

  1. If I click on the Safely remove hardware icon on the tray,
    I can see a menu item for the drive - say drive G: (the light on the USB drive is also on)
  2. If I type in G: into the address bar of explorer,
    it says 'Cannot find...'
  3. If I type in G: into a command prompt window,
    it works and I can do a dir to see the list of directories on the drive.

To fix this, I've to remove-reinsert the pen-drive. But doing it every day is annoying. Also this happens only on this machine.. I use this drive on my home machine and it works flawlessly each time.

Can anyone suggest things that I could try ?

Thanks for reading...

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about windows-xp

Related posts about usb