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Title
Windows XP Can't See a USB Hard Drive
Description
These days, all USB drives are plug-and-play with Windows XP: you plug it in, Windows recognizes it and shows it in the Explorer, usually with a drive letter like <c>F</c>, <c>G</c> or <c>H</c>. Sometimes, however, the auto-detection of the drive letter goes awry and the drive doesn't show up in the Explorer and you're hard-pressed to access it.<fn>
If this has happened to you, you should first verify a few things:
<ul>
Make sure that the drive is plugged in properly and that it is turned on (and/or drawing power somehow, either through its own power adaptor or through the USB connection).
Type <kbd>Windows-Key+Break</kbd> to show <i>System Properties</i>, then go to the <i>Hardware</i> tab and show the <i>Device Manager</i>. Is the drive visible there? If it is, you're in luck.
</ul>
In order to fix the problem, you'll have to assign the drive a new letter.
<ol>
From the <i>Control Panel</i>, select <i>Administrative Tools</i>, then select <i>Computer Management</i>.
In this window, select <i>Disk Management</i> under <i>Storage</i>. On the right, you should see all of the hard disks attached to your computer as well as their partitions.
Select your USB drive from the list and right-click, selecting <i>Change Drive Letter...</i> from the popup menu.
From the resulting dialog, select a letter that doesn't conflict with an existing drive letter (make sure to avoid any letters used by network shares) and press <i>Ok</i>.
</ol>
Your drive should now appear in the Windows Explorer under the newly-assigned letter.
<hr>
<ft>This happened recently with a <a href="http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/portable/freeagent_go/">FreeAgent(tm) Go</a> drive from Seagate, which failed to show up because Windows had assigned it the drive letter <c>H</c>, which was already mapped to a network share.</ft>