I brought a file from home (on a thumb drive) and placed the thumb drive in the USB port of this Emachine. Although I heard a beep and a window opened saying that new hardware was detected I could not find the thumb drive (removable drive" in "My Computer". I looked in the "device manager" and it is there and working properly. I refreshed the view with unsat results.
What am I doing wrong? The thumb drive appears on other computers ( in "My Computer" as a "removable drive".

William Lockie

Leave the thumbdrive plugged in to the computer and reboot.

Is it recognized now?

50-Calibre

Right click on my computer, click Manage, click on disk management, locate your thumb drive, right click and choose assign (or change) a drive letter. If it already has a drive letter, give it a different one as it’s already in use.

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Is this thumb drive USB specific? Some of the newer ones require a 2.0 USB port. It's possible you're plugging it into a 1.0 port.

Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

open my computer and hit the f5 key on your keyboard for a refresh.. might not have posted.

best of luck Frank :

blockie: did any of these suggestions help? please post back your results so we know.

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OK, I did the following:
Tried the reboot as suggested by 50-calibre.
Didn't work.

Used Disk Management as suggested by Stryker.
That did the trick. Drive letter G" was being assigned to the thumb drive. We already had a drive "G" on the network. So I assigned the letter "T" (for thumb) to the thumb drive. Now it appears in "My Computer". Everything is now OK in Fresno, California.

William Lockie

I had a problem getting the USB thumb drive (flash drive) I have being recognized by Windows XP. I tried two different thumbdrive units that also both worked on other computers. I searched for driver fixes for usbhub.sys and usbd.sys and usbstor.sys and usbstor.inf, and XP would not identify these for my hardware or would not recognize the hardware.

I traced the problem to a new HP Laser Printer Laserjet 1020. The HP scanners and HP printers have been known to interfere with USB ports working well. Well, the very SIMPLE fix was to simply turn OFF the laser printer whenever I want to use the USB memory stick, and then to plug in the USB device. Works like a charm. It only took me 3 hours of searching and rebooting.

If you have an HP scanner and/or printer connected using USB ports, temporarily unplug them before you use you memory sticks.