The Conservative Cat

The symptoms were straight out of the Twilight Zone: the user inserted the drive into the USB slot, the little message popped up stating that Windows had found new hardware, and then the drive was nowhere to be found. The Safely Remove Hardware icon showed that the drive was present and that it had been assigned the letter F; however, when the user looked at the contents of drive F, it was something completely alien. She pulled out the drive, stuck it back in, and the exact same thing happened. It was at this point she called Bruce for help. (His business card says When you are truly desperate.)

If a disk drive is behaving strangely, the place you usually go to solve the problem is the Windows Computer Manager. To get to it, you right-click on the My Computer icon and select Manage. This pops up a nifty double-paned window thing. In the left pane, you want to click on Disk Management under the Storage category, and you'll see something like this.

USB drives always show up as removable. In this case, the user has clicked on the USB drive entry in the upper window and that selected it in the lower window (as indicated by the hatching).

The answer to the mystery is obvious once you know it: drive F was already mapped to a network directoy. Windows mounted the USB drive as F even though the letter was in use elsewhere. The alien files were in fact the contents of the network directory.

Fortunately, Disk Management is exactly where we need to be to fix the problem: simply right-click the drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths..., and choose an empty letter. Windows XP will remember the letter and every time you plug in that particular drive, it will show up under the new letter instead of hiding under the skirts of a network directory.

An hour to find the problem, a minute to fix it: that's Windows Hell all over.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat