If you’re like most people, you probably use Windows XP to access your computer’s files and folders. But if you don’t have a USB drive handy, there are a few ways to find your missing drive in Windows XP.

  1. Look in the Start menu and see if there is an option called “Computer.” If there is, click on it and then look for the folder called “USB drives.” If there isn’t one, create one by clicking on the “New” button at the bottom of the screen and then selecting “USB drives.”
  2. Look in your system tray. If you see a blue icon called “USB drives,” it means that your USB drive is currently connected to your computer. To disconnect it, just click on the icon and then select “disconnect.”
  3. Look in your system logs. If you see messages about USB drives being added or removed from your computer, this means that someone has tried to connect or disconnect your USB drive but didn’t succeed. To find out who did this, open up Windows XP’s System Properties and look for the item called " usb devices." This will tell you who connected and disconnected your USB drive as well as when they did it.

More than likely the cause is that Windows renamed the drive to a letter that is already in use. This will happen if you have several card readers, thumb drives or external hard drives attached. It will also happen if you are on a network and have mapped drives.

To find the drive and then rename it, you’ll want to right-click on My Computer and select Manage.

From the Computer Management screen, select Disk Management.

In this window you should see all of your connected physical drives, their format, if they are healthy, and the drive letter.

In this instance I am going to change the drive letter of my Lexar USB drive. Right-click on the drive in the list, and from the resulting menu select “Change Drive Letters and Paths…”

Click on Change so we can change the drive letter. You might notice that you can select Add, which would let you mount the drive into a folder if you wanted to. We don’t want to, so just click Change.

Select a new drive letter from the drop down list, preferably the one that you usually use for this drive.

Click Yes on the confirmation screen and you are done

If you have auto play enabled, you will get the normal pop up dialog asking what you want to do.