USB Drive works fine but missing under 'My Computer'

Hello.

All my drive letters are free after D:, which is being used by the cd rom
drive. I will insert my flash drive, and the windows menu comes up asking me
what to do with the USB drive. I can open and look in there from that menu
fine. If I go to Start > run > "explorer e:", I can browse the e: drive. When
I am in a program and want to save something, I can save to the E: drive.
When I go to disk management and check the volume, it is mounted and assigned
the letter E:.

However, if I double click on 'My Computer', the E: drive does not show up.
Not for this flash drive, or any other.

The only thing that fixed this last time was reimaging this machine. Does
anyone have any ideas?

Thank you!

 

I'd suggest using TweakUI to see if you inadvertedly set the drives to be
hidden in Explorer.
If they are, just re-enable them so that they aren't hidden.

You can download tweakui at microsoft's website (just do a search and you
should be able to find it).

--
Gary Tsang
http://www.gtsang.com

Microsoft MVP - Windows Media Center
http://www.microsoft.com/mvp

 

This is a well known problem with XP and assigning drive letters. If the
expected drive letter has already been assigned to another drive, XP will not
assign a drive letter to the USB drive.

If you have C & D, and th enext expected drive letter is E, and E has been
manually assigned to some other drive that isn't presently plugged in, then
XP wants to assign E to your USB drive but it cant.

Under disk management, try manually assigning a drive letter like Z or some
other high, previously unused, letter to the USB drive.

Having said all this, when this problem happened to me, I never did get it
to work unitl I reloaded XP.