at the college i work at a lot of students are finding that their USB flash drives will not work on the college computer but when i try it on my personal laptop they all work fine, sometimes the usb sticks will show in my computer but wont have anything stored on them when they are supposed to and sometimes they just dont appear in my computer at al, is there anyone that has any ideas?? any help would be great cos out students are getting a bit annoyed now. James

have the college computers been fixed to stop the use of such devices? if you have tried it in front ports, can you also try it in rear ports. (some computers can have the bios set to allow front only or rear only, or both). can you look at device manager to see if usb conrollers look ok there? I have worked for large companies where the computers have been configured to stop use of things like this (presumably due to virus risk / securoty of data etc)

ok i have looked at the suggestions and none of them comply to our problem, they just dont seem to want to work, any other suggestions would be great, James

Hi James your problem could be caused by having mapped drives where the mapped drive letter is the next logical letter after your CD/dvd rom drives. If for instance you cd/dvd drive is e: the next drive letter would be F: I have found that if you delete this drive (F:) reboot and then insert you usb device it will appear. One word of advice : write down what F: drive was mapped before you delete it. You can then assign another letter and map it to the location desired.