USB challenges with Dell Dimension 3000

I'm a bit challenged by a Dell Dimension 3000 running Windows XP Professional with SP 2.

It has 6 USB ports. Regardless of the port I plug a flash drive into I get the same response. Windows recognizes that the drive is there (it comes up in Device manager as a "USB Mass Storage Device" and the icon appears in the system tray which allows me to "Safely remove the device," but when I go into My Computer the drive isn't listed.

I've checked in with Dell Support and they claim that it is a software problem. We've checked BIOS and checked connections inside the case. Everything appears to be in order. I've reinstalled the chipset drivers for the motherboard (the ones provided by Dell and some provided by Intel) to no avail.

The computer is part of a domain yet with all the other computers in the office and outside of it the drive shows up in my computer like it should. I have not tried logging on to the local computer to see if I still have the same problem, but I will be trying that shortly.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Nails

 

assume u'r admin on the local?

what happens in safe mode?

what make/model thumb drive? - u'r issue may be w/ them.

i'd also be curious to what diskmanager reports when the drive is connected. does it show a drive letter here?

 

skeet6961 -

Logged into the local computer as administrator and the drive popped right up as D:\

Under disk management I changed the drive letter to R and it now works when the domain user is logged in. While this solves this problem with an individual flash drive I think a larger issue exists.

The problem is a network drive that is mapped as D:\ when the domain user logs in. yet when I plug the same flash drive into a Windows 2000 computer that is logged into the domain it is automatically assigned a drive letter that is not taken while in Windows XP it just doesn't show up. This seems odd. Why would Windows 2000 automatically assign an available drive letter when Windows XP professional does not? I checked Windows Update and it claims there are no high priority updates for the computer.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks,

Nails

 

pure guess = since D: is network drive, winxp doesn't re-allocate drive letters as it's seeking to auto setup as the 'first' available drive letter which doesn't exist since d: is already net_mapped.

if u could disable the logon script on that machine and test, i'd bet that it works ok. then i'd setup that logon to allocate a latter drive letter for the network map and try it that way.

 

Yeah I agree that probably will work. The login script works fine with Flash drives on Windows 2000 computers, there must be something more that would need to be added for it to work with Windows XP.

Thanks for the assistance Skeet.