Windows XP Can’t See a USB Hard Drive

These days, all USB drives are plug-and-play with Windows XP: you plug it in, Windows recognizes it and shows it in the Explorer, usually with a drive letter like F, G or H. Sometimes, however, the auto-detection of the drive letter goes awry and the drive doesn’t show up in the Explorer and you’re hard-pressed to access it.[1]

If this has happened to you, you should first verify a few things:

• Make sure that the drive is plugged in properly and that it is turned on (and/or drawing power somehow, either through its own power adaptor or through the USB connection).
• Type Windows-Key+Break to show System Properties, then go to the Hardware tab and show the Device Manager. Is the drive visible there? If it is, you’re in luck.

In order to fix the problem, you’ll have to assign the drive a new letter.

1. From the Control Panel, select Administrative Tools, then select Computer Management.
2. In this window, select Disk Management under Storage. On the right, you should see all of the hard disks attached to your computer as well as their partitions.
3. Select your USB drive from the list and right-click, selecting Change Drive Letter… from the popup menu.
4. From the resulting dialog, select a letter that doesn’t conflict with an existing drive letter (make sure to avoid any letters used by network shares) and press Ok.

Your drive should now appear in the Windows Explorer under the newly-assigned letter.