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Friday, 25 September 2009

How to find missing USB drive in pc

Most USB devices are assigned a temporary drive letter when they are plugged into a computer. When you plug it in, the computer looks through it's list of available drive letters and assigns the next available one. The computer starts from "A" and goes on through "Z". Typically, letters "A" through "C" are not available.

Experience has shown me that, when most of these earlier drive letters are taken, USB storage devices tend to start having problems being detected. CD and DVD drives take up some. If you have your hard drive partitioned (divided), each partition will have it's own drive letter. Mapped network drives (especially if you're in the office) can take up more. If you don't have any letters available between "D" and "H", that might be why you can't find your USB storage device.SOLUTION: You can fix this by re-assigning the letters for your other drives. CAUTION! You should not touch letters "A" through "C".

· If you have an icon on your Desktop called "My Computer" or "Computer, right-click on it and select "Manage". If the icon is not on your Desktop, go to the Start menu (bottom left corner) and look for "My Computer" or "Computer". If you see it, right-click on it and select "Manage".

· On the left, you should see a list of "System Tools", "Storage", and "Services and Applications". Under "Storage", left-click on "Disk Management". This will then show you a list of all the drives on your computer.

· DO NOT TOUCH DISK 0! This is your main hard drive. You should see that it has the letter "C:" assigned to it.What you can touch are the other drives like your CD or DVD drives.If you right-click on the drive, you will see an option to "Change Drive Letter and Paths". Click on that option.

· In the new window that pops up, select "Change". This will bring you to another window where you can select a new letter.

· Select a new letter past "H:" and click "OK".

· You only really need to do free up an early drive letter for your USB storage device. If all you need is one, close out the Computer Management window.

· Restart your computer just to make sure everything resets properly.

· When the computer starts up again, try to plug in your USB storage device again. It should now be assigned the letter that you just freed up.

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