Roger DeReu: Hi this is Roger DeReu, and I have the website freecomputerconsultant.com and you know one of the most popular pages on my website is called USB Drive Letter Missing. That's where you take one of these whole USB sticks or devices some kind USB and you plug it in and it's recognized by Windows, but it doesn't assign a drive letter so that you can actually work with the device, your copy files to and from with the Windows Explorer or whatever and then people don't know how to get access to that device and it's way not too difficult, but that might be easier if I would show you with the screencast.
So we have a My Computer icon or here I've renamed mine for the more descriptive title. If you have that on your screen, you can simply right click it and select manage, and here you get those computer management tool. But if you don't have that icon available, there are couple other ways to get there; one is maybe that I as on your start button, you might access to My Com. You can right click, select manage or you can the run command and what you want to type in is this compmgmt.msc and just click OK and that will bring up the same tool.
And under storage here, there is a disk management option, and you can see on the top the different drives. Now down here in the bottom, it's a more graphical. You can see on the top here is my hard disk. This is a zip drive I mentioned. But here is this disk to removable 489 megabits. Now that it works up pretty well. I know that it's a 512 megabyte USB device I have in there and format is 489 megabytes. But you see up here my C drive has, that will see there, you know that partition is accessible with the drive letter C.
But down here there is none. There is no drive letter and it's really pretty easy. Just right click and select change, drive letter and paths. Select that and you'll see there are no drive letters here. Click add, and here you can add a new drive letter path for this 480 megabyte 89 megabyte FAT partition primary disk 2. Okay, that does mean a lot.
It's a USB device and you can assign the following drive letter. you can choose any unassigned drive letter and you know usually reasons had just maybe have a network drive it's already mapped there printer with a lot these USB devices in it and already drive letters, just kind of conflicting with of one of those and that's why you see this problem in the first place. But, just take an unused drive letter and click ok. And you see we've pops open this drive is empty. But I can now I can take things that I can copy to it and I can access it and down here you see now it's kind of real things will from my zip drive but we know that it is.
We double click it and there it is. That's the way elders do it and if you are for close that out and if you decide you, you don't like if you can just go back in there and you can change it to, to something else. You can make it G if you want to and I'll say oh boy, this might cost for us to run well. If you don't think its running, that's not a problem click it as and becomes G, pops it open and you can manipulate files on that. So it's pretty easy. But your problem we find that the next time you use this device Windows will probably assign the same drive letter that you gave at this time is almost as nothing can flick it or if it is something deflecting they will try to assign that drive and you won't see it again. But it's pretty easy to fix as you've seen here.
I got one of their tips and ideas on the website. I do hope you and stop by and visit us at www.freecomputerconsultant.com. Hope this video has helped. Thanks for watching.
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