Strange USB Memory Stick Problem

[Russ77]

This one has got me stumped!!!

I have an HP Laptop running W7 which I've been able to plug in various USB devices, memory cards/readers etc without problem.

Tried using a new 32GB memory stick last night and all appeared to be OK, the drivers seemed to install and I could see the new removable drive in My Computer BUT it was showing total size 0b, available size 0b.

Thought it'd just need formatting but wouldn't let me do that.

Plugged it into my XP machine, fired up first time showing 29GB available and let me copy files to it. Tried it in the laptop again but the same thing happened as before.

Back to the XP machine, tried various formats but the same result on the HP Laptop. Saying that, occasionally it would let me open it up and look like it would allow me to copy files to it but the transfer rates were around 1MB/s.

I then tried it in the wife's W7 laptop, worked no problems. Finally I used a different profile on my Laptop and again it worked fine!

So..... there's something on my profile that stopping this USB stick from working BUT other USB sticks work just fine. I'm stuck!!!

I know it's probably easier just to use a new profile to copy data to/from the stick but it's the principle of the matter

Now I've come to work I have had one more idea..... I installed a Verbatim portable HDD and there was some softeware called "Green Button" which I believe auto ejects the drive if it thinks it's no longer needed. Could this somehow be stopping/ejecting the USB stick?

 

[neil_g]

what file system does W7 think it is? (disk management will show it)

 

[Russ77]

what file system does W7 think it is? (disk management will show it)

FAT32 but I've tried exFAT and NTFS too with no success.

Shows up in Disk Management as healthy and shows 29GB available.

 

[neil_g]

has it got a drive letter too?

 

[Russ77]

has it got a drive letter too?

Yeah but this is strange too....

It was coming up on the laptop as G.

When I reformatted on the XP machine I changed it to U. On the wife's laptop it was showing as U but at first on mine it was still G but after reinserting it changed to U.

 

[neil_g]

i would be inclinded to delete the partition in disk manager on W7 and recreate and see if that works.

another suggestion for troublesome USB drives is to set it to "optimize for performance" rather for fast removal.

 

[Russ77]

i would be inclinded to delete the partition in disk manager on W7 and recreate and see if that works.

another suggestion for troublesome USB drives is to set it to "optimize for performance" rather for fast removal.

The only options I get in Disk Management is to change drive letter or format, the partition options are greyed out

I suppose I could try that on the wife's machine.........

 

[neil_g]

The only options I get in Disk Management is to change drive letter or format, the partition options are greyed out

I suppose I could try that on the wife's machine.........

right click it in my computer and i think its on properties off the top of my head, itll need to be on the W7 machine

 

[RobertP]

XP can be funny about recognising things and need a driver for some things you'd never consider needing one with W7. Just wondering if this needs a different one to what installed to use it properly?

edit the profile thing might be loading different drivers...

 

[Russ77]

XP can be funny about recognising things and need a driver for some things you'd never consider needing one with W7. Just wondering if this needs a different one to what installed to use it properly?

edit the profile thing might be loading different drivers...

Ironically XP isn't the problem, it installed and worked on there first time, same with my wife's laptop.

Just seems like there's something on my user account that's screwing it up......

 

[Russ77]

Fixed it.......

Disabled Verbatim's "Green Button" software, changed the drive letter to Q and reformatted as NTFS.

Currently copying 10GB of random files to it as a test