USB Flash Drive or USB Hard Drive does not show up in My Computer or Windows Explorer
The USB drive letter missing can happen for a couple of reasons.
Have you ever plugged in a USB flash drive or USB hard drive, had Windows pop up a little balloon in the task tray telling you it found the device, but not be able to access it? Frustrating, yes?
Let's blame Bill Gates!
Chances are the solution lies in Windows (stupidly) assigning the USB drive a "drive letter" that is already in use. This commonly happens when you have a drive already mapped to a network resource. Windows then assigns the same drive letter to the device. Sometimes, Windows just doesn't assign a drive letter at all.
And the answer is...
The Solution for the USB Drive Letter Missing is to open the Computer Management snap-in. Due to Windows lack of access to this tool by default, the easiest way for me to tell you to get there is to click the START button, select "Run" and type: compmgmt.msc in the dialog box and press ENTER. Under "Storage" click "Disk Management". Here is what it looks like with my USB Hard Drive and the USB drive letter is missing:
You can also right click your My Computer Desktop Icon (if it exists) and select Manage. Or, you can go thru the Start Menu to Administrative Tools (if you have told Windows to put Administrative Tools on your Start Menu) and select "Computer Management".
However you get there;
There you will see your hard disk (probably labeled "Disk 0") your CD-Rom drive(s) and your USB flash drive (or USB hard drive). You can also see what drive letter is assigned to each drive or partition of a drive.
Right click on the USB drive and choose "change drive letter or path".
Now click the "Add" button.
Assign an unused drive letter from the drop down box and click Ok.
Here is the finished product, showing the USB device with and associated drive letter.
Keep in mind that this will work if Windows DOES recognize the device (meaning no yellow "!" ín device manager) but just the USB drive letter is missing.
If there is a problem indicated in device manager, or you get a popup notification that there was a problem installing hardware, that's a different issue.
