My Shintaro 256MB USB thumb drive is not always recognised after being plugged-into a Windows XP or 2000 machine. The problem may persist even after unplugging and reinserting the device.

Connect your USB thumb drive to the computer. Check whether it is recognised. If it is correctly recognised, do not attempt the following procedure. Assuming the drive is not recognised, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’. Open ‘Administrative Tools’ and then ‘Computer Management’. In the left-hand pane, click ‘Disk Management’. Now, check if the drive is recognised in the right-hand pane. If the drive is recognised, you should see a volume in the right-hand pane with an icon representing a removable drive. Right-click on the drive and select ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’¦’. This will allow you to assign a drive letter to the drive, which you will be able to access from Windows Explorer.

Should your drive not be listed in Computer Management, the removable drive has not been recognised nor installed by Windows. This is a more concerning problem. Other people do experience similar problems with USB storage devices, whereby they need to occasionally unplug and replug-in the device so that it is recognised by Windows. In some extreme cases, they even need to reboot Windows. However, since the problem occurs on multiple computers, you possibly have a faulty thumb drive. You could test this theory by plugging a friend’s thumb drive into your computer. If the problem does not occur, it looks like you have a faulty drive. In this case you should probably copy your data from the thumb drive onto your computer, wipe all your data off the thumb drive, then exchange it for a new one.