Invisible flash drive

[Brucelles]

I have recently had problems with USB storage devices. One is a generic 2GB flash drive and the other a Sansa Sandisk MP3 player that uses a generic USB flash drive driver.

I plug them in, they light up, they appear in hardware manager but they aren't visible in explorer or any instance of explorer functionality ('save' dialogues etc). I have tried the obvious things, like unplugging and replugging, looking for new drivers and messing about generally, and got nowhere.

The USB stick is mostly OK. It just vanishes with my Vista laptop. (I haven't tried the Sandisk with Vista, as that wouldn't help my daughter, whose laptop is XP). The Sandisk vanishes on my daughter's XP laptop and my XP desktop but is fine on my laptop which is the same model and OS as my daughter's.

I can sort of see the Sandisk in Media Player, and I can copy data to it *apparently*, but the data don't arrive. It's a major pain as it is a neat little 8Gb player with great sound and a cool interface, but pretty much useless to my daughter unless she can load music onto it.

Does anyone have a clue as to the cause and resolution?

[0iD]

Re-assign the drive letter for the usb drive. This usually happens when windows assigns a drive letter to a removable drive that has already been allocated.
Worth a try

[sjbuck]

We get this all the time at work, flash drives mapping themselves to the same drive letter as the users home drive (H, a quick remap sorts it out

[Brucelles]

Thanks guys. It works for the memory stick, but not for the Sandisk. I guess that using Novell networks doesn't help, as the flash drive is only ever a problem when I am plugged into the Bank of Tanzania's novell network.

Re the Sandisk E280. I guess I will just have to bother Sansa about it. Apart from this one, fatal, problem, it's a great device.