Here is the scenario, my boss sticks his USB pen drive into his new Sony Viao Notebook that I configured for him. Windows XP goes through the motions of recognizing a new piece of hardware, configures the hardware, assigns it a drive mapping and reports back that the hardware is ready to go. But, when he clicks on the pen drive (in this example Drive F) in Windows Explorer the dialog box pops up “Please Insert Disk Into Drive”.

Reboot. Same thing. Pop in any USB pen drive into the machine and Windows says it is ready to go but can’t see the information on the drive. What is going on?
Well, there is a third player on stage in this drama, however, and his name is OpenAFS for Windows. Yes, OpenAFS has something to do with this dilemma. Turns out my boss has configured OpenAFS to map a couple of drives when he logs onto the AFS file space here at work. One of those mapped drive letters is drive F.

I think you are beginning to see the picture.

Drive F is also the drive that Windows is trying to assign the newly installed USB devices. But why did it take nearly a month for this to happen? Turns out if my boss boots the machine AND logs into AFS BEFORE inserting the USB device everything is fine since Windows can see the F drive previously mapped by OpenAFS. But when he does not log into the AFS server the F mapping is still reserved by OpenAFS but Windows can’t tell that the letter is reserved and tries to map the pen drive to it.

Simple work around when you are able to define all the terms. Simply remap the drive letter for the pen drive to something other than F (or whatever letter is causing the problem) in Disk Management in the MMC.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Computer, Pitt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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