USB Flash Drives creation of "ghost drive" letter

[Guest]

Can any help? My laptop has C,D drives,E (CD drive). I add a flash drive
which shows as F. If I add one additional flash drive at the same time this
shows on the Control Panel as Removable Drive G and H (with the correct name
for the USB flash drive). Clicking on Properties for G shows Full and H space
available. I cannot transfer data to Drive H as the messages say the drive is
full. I am therefore unable to use the USB flash drive due to the extra drive
which does not exist. Can anyone tell me how to instruct the XP system to
recognise the USB drive and get rid of "ghost drive" G?

 

[Ian Betts]

Mine does not do that, it reads F and G so it may be that you need to make
sore your USB drivers are up to date. Put the driver disk in and reload.

 

[Guest]

--
Hardy Country

Mine does not do that, it reads F and G so it may be that you need to make
sore your USB drivers are up to date. Put the driver disk in and reload.



--
Ian



Thanks Ian. My flash drives are USB, without drivers, and are recognised by the system. The problem is the extra drive shown up when it does not exist and this prevents me from adding data to the drive. My flash drive seems to have allocated a spurious number to itself. The struggle continues. Regards

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Can any help? My laptop has C,D drives,E (CD drive). I add a flash drive
which shows as F. If I add one additional flash drive at the same time this
shows on the Control Panel as Removable Drive G and H (with the correct name
for the USB flash drive). Clicking on Properties for G shows Full and H space
available. I cannot transfer data to Drive H as the messages say the drive is
full. I am therefore unable to use the USB flash drive due to the extra drive
which does not exist. Can anyone tell me how to instruct the XP system to
recognise the USB drive and get rid of "ghost drive" G?

Never heard about an effect like that. You could try an USB drive
cleanup. I've made a simple commandline tool for that:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/drivecleanup.zip

It removes from the device tree non present
- storage volumes
- USB disk devices
- USB mass storage devices

If you start it while the nasty drive is _not_ attached, then
it's completely removed and will be redetected when it's
attached next time (as all other USB drives which had been
attached earlier and has been not present when DriveCleanup
was executed.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[Guest]

--
Hardy Country

Never heard about an effect like that. You could try an USB drive
cleanup. I've made a simple commandline tool for that:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/drivecleanup.zip

It removes from the device tree non present
- storage volumes
- USB disk devices
- USB mass storage devices

If you start it while the nasty drive is _not_ attached, then
it's completely removed and will be redetected when it's
attached next time (as all other USB drives which had been
attached earlier and has been not present when DriveCleanup
was executed.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe




Dear Uwe,

Thanks for your helpful reply. I ran your cleanup. Out of my 3 flash drives
2 were
recognised with their label name and correctly shown as Drive F, as follows:
Thumb (F)
Thumb2 (F)
the problem flash drive was shown as follows:
Removable Drive (G)
Thumb3 (H)
and not Thumb3 as I would expect. Clicking on Properties then Eject gives
an outlined (in blue) Removable Drive (F) in the case of the twp good drives.
It looks as though the 3rd flash drive has a mixture of two states, a) When
loaded ie Thumb3 (H) and b) drive clicked ready for ejection. This joint
combination is preventing the flash drive from being used.

Thanks for your help,Uwe. I shall still continue to try to catch the system
when its back is turned. Even renaming the flash drive did not fool the
system as you can see it still persists in giving totally wrong information
reports. All 3 flash drives were plugged into the same USB port one after the
other.
Regards and best wishes from UK,
Barry

 

[C.Joseph Drayton]

Can any help? My laptop has C,D drives,E (CD drive). I add a flash drive
which shows as F. If I add one additional flash drive at the same time this
shows on the Control Panel as Removable Drive G and H (with the correct name
for the USB flash drive). Clicking on Properties for G shows Full and H space
available. I cannot transfer data to Drive H as the messages say the drive is
full. I am therefore unable to use the USB flash drive due to the extra drive
which does not exist. Can anyone tell me how to instruct the XP system to
recognise the USB drive and get rid of "ghost drive" G?

Hi Dorset,

Is this a U3 enabled thumbdrive? U3 creates a VD for a CDROM
image that it uses. One drive the CDROM VD can not be
written to, the other drive is the on where you can actually
write to.

Note also that if it is a U3 drive it may have come with
software already installed and may be using up some of the
space on the drive. The first U3 enabled thumbdrive I bought
was a Sandisk. It was a 512MB drive and had 260MB of
programs on it.

You can go to the U3 site and download a program that will
remove U3 from the thumbdrive and make all space available
to use as one partition.

I automatically delete U3 from and thumbdrive I buy since it
will lock up a Mac solid if you plug it in.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt,
to respond to an unreasonable request."

 

[Guest]

--
Hardy Country

Hi Dorset,

Is this a U3 enabled thumbdrive? U3 creates a VD for a CDROM
image that it uses. One drive the CDROM VD can not be
written to, the other drive is the on where you can actually
write to.

Note also that if it is a U3 drive it may have come with
software already installed and may be using up some of the
space on the drive. The first U3 enabled thumbdrive I bought
was a Sandisk. It was a 512MB drive and had 260MB of
programs on it.

You can go to the U3 site and download a program that will
remove U3 from the thumbdrive and make all space available
to use as one partition.

I automatically delete U3 from and thumbdrive I buy since it
will lock up a Mac solid if you plug it in.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt,
to respond to an unreasonable request."
Thank you. I have decided to take the route of directing the file save to that drive letter which is declared by the system as being open. I have an Integral 2GB flash drive but am not sure whether it has U3, it certainly it had a password facility which I deleted. On analysing the flash drive it said that it was 12 bit and should be 32 bit FAT. As I am at the stone age part of this branch of rocket science I shall leave things as they stand. At least my other drives or OK. Grateful for your interest and help. Regards