You may have faced a problem when you insert your pen drive and it gets detected very easily but it doesn’t show up as a drive icon in My Computer. The computer detects the pen drive but data on pen drive is not visible as the pen drive is not visible in My Computer (Explorer).
This problem occurs mainly when windows XP fails to allocate a drive letter to your portable drive(pen drive). It occurs mostly with new pen drives connected to your computer for the first time. If you face such problem then it may not be the pen drive’s fault, rather it may be windows trouble.
Fix:
You can fix this issue by following some simple steps given below.
1. Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.
2. In the console tree, click Disk Management. The Disk Management window will appear.
3. On this disk management window, you can see some drives including the portable drive. Right click on your portable drive and click change drive letter and paths.
4. Now a assign a new drive letter which is not being used by any of your drives in My Computer.
5. After assigning the new drive letter your portable drive will show up in my computer with other drives
Sujit Ahluwalia, January 2009
