HowlCat

No need. Turns out it was a nasty bit of rootkit malware causing all the trouble. I downloaded and ran a free program called TDSSkiller from Kaspersky and that did the trick, all USB drives are now working fine. Many thanks for your help and support!

I have just tried this also. I took note of my internal HDD number but when I select 'show hidden devices' no more drives show up in Device Manager/Disk Drives, still only my internal HDD. So anyway, I bit the bullet and decided to plug in one of my older USB drives (with nothing much on) and then uninstalled that when it showed up in Disk Drives, then restarted, but, you guessed it, still nothing happening I'm afraid :(

Hi KenB, many thanks for your response. I tried the method you described but unfortunately it didn't correct the problem. There were 3 entries for "generic volume" in Device Manager/Storage volume. I uninstalled the first 2 without a problem and they promptly disappeared from the list. However, on trying to uninstall the last one it kept throwing up the warning that goes something like, "in order the complete the changes you need to restart the system. Do you want to restart now?" If I click "no" the last generic volume entry remains where it is. I tried several times but it seems to remain unless I click "yes" to restart. So then I did indeed click "yes" to restart, then restarted again when I received the message prompt on the Desktop. Have tried this several times but no joy I'm afraid. Looking in Device Manager again, the 3 "generic volumes" remain listed there, although I don't know whether they've just been reinstalled automatically. Anyway, thanks again for the suggestion.

Hi, I have an ageing Dell laptop running Windows XP. As it has a fairly small (40GB) internal IDE hard-drive that is pretty full I regularly use a couple of external drives for non-essential stuff like music, photos, videos etc. A few days ago I switched on one the external drives and nothing happened! I usually access my external drives by going into My Computer and clicking on it there but the icon simply didn't appear. At first I thought it was a problem with the drive itself, but when I tried another drive the same thing happened. So far, I've tried 2 mains-powered external drives, 2 portable drives and several USB flash-drives and I can't access any of them. I have since tested most of my external memory devices on a relative's laptop/notebook and they work just fine, so it seems to be a problem with the USB ports and/or Window XP missing drivers? If I go into Device Manager the connected HDDs appear okay and it states that everything is working normally. Also, I have checked XP's Disc Management program and they show up in there too, but as unformatted drives, hence why the no-show in My Computer. When I plug in a USB flash-drive it does show up in My Computer, but when I try to access it I get a message saying the drive isn't formatted. But, as I have already mentioned, I have tested the drives on another computer and they all still work fine. Help! The funny thing is, my wireless mouse, that uses a USB dongle, is still functioning perfectly, as is my digital camera/SD card when connected via USB. So it seems to be a problem specifically with external HDDs and memory sticks. Any assistance with this perplexing issue would be greatly appreciated!