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I have a USB stick that when plugged in to my computer, triggers the noise when a new device is inserted however, the USB itself is hidden and cannot be accessed.

It does not show up in 'My Computer' nor does it show up when I enter "E:" (because it is inserted in my E drive) in cmd. Is anybody able to help me make the USB visible and accessible?

Hennes
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  • Can you please start diskpart, enter "list volume" and tell us what the output looks like? Do you see the volume there? You can also take a look at the compmgmt.msc GUI. – Werner Henze Jun 19 '13 at 09:00

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Three possibilities:

  1. The drive has a bad or unknown format. Try formatting it. This will delete what's on it.
  2. The drive has a protection active, you need some kind of unlocking software to access it.
  3. The drive is broken. You might repair it, try chkdsk.

("because its inserted in my E drive" is not certain. What do you mean is your E drive? A specific USB port?)

jtheman
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  • Yeah, I am almost positive the drive has some sort of protection software on it. Is there any command in cmd that I can call that may override the protection? –  Jun 18 '13 at 23:04
  • No, that is very unlikely. – jtheman Jun 18 '13 at 23:05
  • Let's not gloss over #1 - the filesystem could just be unknown. If the USB is formatted for Mac or is EXT3 or something, windows will recognize it, but not read it. Try booting a linux livecd like ubuntu and try reading the usb with gparted or something similar to figure out the format. If the protection is hardware based, you won't be able to read it, if it's software, you can still read it. Might be encrypted, but still readable. – skub Jun 19 '13 at 02:47
  • I think Windows assigns different drive letters based on the device ID, not on the USB port it's plugged into. Perhaps if you click the "remove device" icon in the system tray, it will tell you whether it's assigned to any drive letters. – mwfearnley Jun 19 '13 at 03:25