USB drive not detected in explorer when plugged in

BrokenWing · ‎10-21-2019

Hi guys,

I've got a bit of a weird problem. I am installing a new notebook (ProBook 470 G5) for one of my colleagues. They use a lot of different USB drives for there work.

When I plug in one USB drive, it will not show up in Windows Explorer. So I checked if it will show up in disk management and drive manager. In both it comes up when plugging in. Disk management is assigning the letter D to the drive.
When I open Explorer and navigating to D itself with the navigation bar, I can open the drive normally.

It doesn't matter what USB stick I use, it happens by all of them.
But, when I connect a second USB stick (with the first still connected), this one will show up in the Explorer as the E: drive.

Normally the D drive is used for a CD/DVD player. This laptop doesn't have one, so that should not be the bottleneck.

I would like to know if one of you knows how I can let the D drive show up in Windows Explorer, or how I can set the default drive letter for any USB to for example the E:. Changing the drive letter in disk management for every USB stick is not an option, because the user does only know how to turn on and use the notebook the way he uses it.

Help is very appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
BrokenWing

WAWood · ‎10-21-2019

@BrokenWing

I followed the instructions in this thread -- and they worked: https://www.howtogeek.com/96298/assign-a-static-drive-letter-to-a-usb-drive-in-windows-7/

Yeah I know it says Win7, but the steps are the same for Win10.

Every time I stuck in the USB stick, Win10 assigned it the same letter.

But ... when I stuck in a different USB stick, that one got assigned a different, low value letter.

So, this only partially works.

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BrokenWing · ‎10-22-2019

@WAWood
Thank you for your reply. I know these workaround for one USB stick at a time.
As I wrote in my post, it is not really an option to assign a drive letter to one USB stick at a time, because my colleague uses multiple sticks on a day and is not so handy with computers.

If you have other ideas, please let me know.