I bought a 4GB A-Data Model RB1 USB drive from newegg to transfer files to and from work. Well... I plug the thing in here, and the little light comes on, computer recognizes it, but wont let me put anything on it... says the correct path is not specified. I mess with it a minute and achieve no other results... So I pull it out, uninstall it from the USB section of device manager, and plug it back in (after a reboot mind you), and now... no light comes on, but the computer sees it... YET it says 'device failed to start'.

I'm going to take it home and see if it works on my (more reliable) machine... in any case, does this sound like a DOA drive?

maybe you shouldn't touch things in device manager...


did you go to disk management and see if it was formatted/partitioned?

Yeah, I tried to format it, it wouldn't respond to that either.


edit: That is to say, I tried to format it when the computer saw it, but wouldn't let me transfer files. This was before the uninstalling ect.

Sounds like a crappy jumpdrive. Every USB jumpdrive I've used, the computer lets me use it right away.

Return it and get a new one, if possible? I assume you didn't void its warranty or something.

I don't know how I would go about voiding the warranty on it, short of taking it apart... which i haven't done.

if you ate it and then **** it out, that would probably void the warranty.:confused:

Ok well I took it home, works fine on my PC. What would make it act so screwy on this machine? Both OSes are XP Pro SP2.

Sounds weird. I've never had that happen before. Does anyone else have that problem at work?

Well, you can disable the USB mass storage driver either via the registry or renaming a file. Some workplaces do that so that you can't walk out with a ton of data easily. However, from what I recall, if it's disabled it won't show up as a drive letter or anything, which kind of contradicts what he's saying.

When I opened my first jump drive, right after opening the package, it fell into a bowl of chili.

Worked great, though. I kept it a long time.

Well I've had my drive plug in and then not mount the volume for some reason. I just unplug it and plug it back in and it works fine.

You can try plugging it in a different port (for some reason, at least on XP, Windows is dumb and thinks it's a new device when you put it in a different port, and reinstalls the drivers.

You probably shouldn't touch the device manager drivers... you might have broken ALL USB drives by removing the drivers Windows needs to mount them. However if that's true Windows should just grab them from Windows Update or (more likely) it would ask for a Windows CD to fix it.

...why? That was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

The USBs all work fine I didn't uninstall the USB driver just the 'USB Mass Storage Device' it had listed. Anyway, I tried 5 of the 6 USB ports on this machine. None work. The USB Printers still work so the USB ports are fine. I was considering that maybe it was due to the fact that the drive is USB2.0 and this computer probably is not, but I was under the impression all devices were reverse compatable.