USB Key Drives not appearing in Windows Explorer

[Guest]

I am an administrator for about 1200 Windows XP boxes on a university campus.
On about half of the machines, when a user inserts his usb key drive, the
drive is picked up by windows (the bubble appears, and it makes its little
found hardware noise), but the drive never shows up in the Windows Explorer
(or My Computer for that matter) windows. The drive can be accessed by typing
the path from the run window, and from all applications, also restarting the
computer seems to temporarily fix the problem. Unfortunatly, due to the way
we are required to push out software, a reboot can take upwards of 45 minutes
(this is a university wide mandate from a different issue, and cannot be
changed). I clearly can't have professors canceling their classes because
they can't use a usb key drive.

As of today, all of the systems have up-to-date bioses and all are fully
patched. It is clearly not a driver issue as all of the machines can read the
disks, and a reboot allows them normal operation. By the same token, it
cannot be a hardware problem because all of the key drives do work, and the
computers do work (sometimes). Which leads be to think it is a Windows
problem. If anyone has any ideas, I am more than open to them. Thank you for
your time.

 

[Mike D]

I've had this happen to me. Our network login process assigns drive letter
F: to the first network drive. The first time I insert a new USB thumb
drive into a particular USB port, Windows wants to give it the F: letter.
It looks to me like the first assignment (to the LAN drive) takes
precedence, and the USB drive is ignored.

I then have to go to My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management, right click
in the area with the removeable drive on letter F:, and select "change drive
letter and paths". Then I select an unused letter from the scroll window,
exit, and the drive becomes visible and useable.

After the first time I do this for a USB/port, it seems to keep the
settings. Subsequent insertions of the same drive continue to work without
going through the process again.

 

[Guest]

That is true for a single drive on a single machine. However, different
brands/and models of usb key have different serial numbers. As a result, me
changing the drive path for my key on a computer, has no effect if I insert a
key other than my own. I have roughly 13000 users, and I can almost
guarentee that there are probably 1000 different drive types. To complicate
this, I have 19 mapped drives starting at the letter F.

I can't possibly give all of them admin level permissions, and tell them to
reassign their driver letters. What is very strange, is that Windows seems
to recognize the drive, and if you go to a run dialogue, you can type in the
path of the drive and access it normally. You can also access the drive from
within applications (word, excel, ppt, etc). The drive just doesn't want to
show up in windows explorer and my computer windows.