USB drive problem

[superdave1984]

We have several users that bring USB thumb drives and want to use them to save work on them. Problem is, we have several computers here that refuse to recognize the drives. The light comes on, the pop up saying new hardware found, but the device simply does not show up. It happens on different PC's, different models. All XP Pro machines. Current drivers. It's not a permissions issue because I can log in and the thing not work either.

 

[atomic tofu]

from another post i did..
go into bios and reset to default or adjust usb settings...enable all usb settings

these computers are not locked down to prevent usb usage?
HOWTO: Use Group Policy to disable USB, CD-ROM, Floppy Disk and LS-120 drivers
also could be drive letter conflict...see if it's actually being seen by drive management

 

[superdave1984]

It doesn't show up anywhere. We don't have GPO that prevents using them either. Although we probably should. I will go into the BIOS and check there however to see if something is haywire. Weirder still is USB printers, keyboards, etc. work fine. It's just the drives that are screwy.

 

[superdave1984]

Anybody got any ideas? Nothing in the BIOS to prevent this from working. And some PC's of the exact same model work fine, some don't. Is this a windows thing or a hardware issue?

 

[Yek]

I take it you tried the BIOS option?

 

[atomic tofu]

see if you can find sptd.sys in system32 or system32/drivers....delete, rename or move

restart and see if that will do something

edit: do this for test...attach the drive to the systems that do not "see" it. Then open up various apps and see if you can actually access the drive from inside the apps.

you may be able to access the drive by typing the drive letter in address line and maybe even start/run

if the above 2 allow you to use/see the drive, something is preventing explorer from doing so. Which I would assume is because of a previous it person or some funky network installs of windows.

might be an adobe app responsible for this block as well

 

[superdave1984]

Tried all this with no luck. No sptd.sys file was found either. The only adobe app on there is Acrobat reader 7. I hate to format and reinstall XP because she has tons of documents and such that would need to be moved. But it's driving me nuts. And I refuse to be beaten by an inanimate object.

 

[atomic tofu]

did ya try uininstalling reader though? give it a reboot and see if it works...if ya did, never mind

random adobe has can do this to various machines, it's the oddest thing