USB drive assigned wrong (or no) letter

[Killer42]

Hi all.

Summary
Plugging flash drive into work PC, no drive appears.

Details
First of all, I have searched TheScripts for an answer. The closest I found was this article which covered similar, but not identical issues.

In more detail, the problem is this. I have two flash disks, an old 256MB USB1.1 and a newer (though not really new) 2GB USB2. They both appear to be working perfectly, and I'm trying to move all my stuff from the older to the newer. At home, on two different PCs, they both work A-OK. At work, the old drive works just fine, and is assigned drive letter F. As far as I can tell, Windows is trying to assign the newer one drive letter G, which is already used for a network drive.

Regardless of which USB port I plug the 2GB into, and in which order (on its own, after the 256MB, straight after restart, whatever) it doesn't show up as a drive. If I go into the Device Manager (or double-click the "safely remove" icon) I can see the device. If I tell it to populate the list of volumes on the device, it shows drive G. The size is around 2GB, as expected. If I try to see the properties, it brings up the properties for the "real" drive G. Since it's something like a couple of TB, I'm pretty sure it's not the same drive (I wish!). :)

Any ideas on how I can resolve this? It looks to me as though Windows is recognising the device and the volume alright, but I somehow need to get it to assign a different drive letter.

[dafodil]

Have you tried changing the drive letter?

Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.

Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.

Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then click Disk Management in the left pane.

Right-click the drive, the partition, the logical drive, or the volume that you want to assign a drive letter to, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Click Change.

Click Assign the following drive letter if it is not already selected, click the drive letter that you want to use, and then click OK.

Click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the drive letter change

[Killer42]

Have you tried changing the drive letter?

No, I haven't But I will now. Thanks.

(This is the sort of tip I was looking for. I knew there had to be some way to change drive letters, but the only one I could remember was in the properties for a CDROM drive, years ago.)

[Killer42]

Thanks a heap, dafodil - that did the trick.

I guess we can close this thread, now.