toshiba laptop cannot recognize 2gb flash drive

hi. it's been quite a while since i last posted. i've had trouble using flash drives with 1gb up, at least with my laptop (toshiba satellite a40). when i plug in any flash drive with 1gb or higher capacity, it recognizes the hardware at first (mass storage device) but then stops and asks me for the drivers.

winxp device manager placed the flash drive in 'removable media' but with a yellow-triangle-with-exclamation-mark warning icon that drivers are not available for it.

it's weird because i had an older 256mb flash drive that worked well with it. weirder still, my older amd-based desktop pc had no problem recognizing the 2gb drive.

my laptop uses winxp-sp2, has 768mb ram, and a celeron 2.6mhz processor. i also installed the osx transformation pack (from osx.portraitofakite.com) but as far as i know it only replaces the default icon set with those resembling osx system icons. besides, my desktop pc uses the osx transformation pack and has no problem recognizing the higher-capacity flash drives. the desktop pc has 512mb ram and uses a 1.1ghz amd processor.

unfortunately, my usb 2gb flash drive had no driver cd, and since it's not branded, i cannot find the proper manufacturer. the drive was sold through 'cd-r king,' which gained popularity in the philippines because of its low-cost products, mostly from china. but then again, my laptop also refuses to recognize branded 1gb-and-up flash drives (including kingston).

i've also read a recent thread on winxp pc's refusing to recognize flash drives, but somehow i cannot apply it to my case. hope you understand. i'll appreciate very much any suggestion. thanks and advance happy easter :redeyes:

The only thing I can think of to ask at the moment is if the Windows installation is the Toshiba one or a subsequent XP install using Windows' own chipset drivers.

I could have sworn I answered this by asking if the laptop is 1.1 or usb 2.0...

Hi Platypus and NooNoo, many thanks for your replies.

On the WinXP version on my Toshiba, I actually upgraded from XP Home (preinstalled on the Toshiba laptop) to XP Professional (using a standalone XP Pro CD). I'm not sure if it changed the device drivers on my laptop during the 'upgrade.'

On the USB 1.1/2.0 issues, what puzzles me is that my older desktop PC, which has USB 1.1, can recognize and use the 2gb flash drive. Yet my laptop, which uses USB 2.0, can't. I tried looking for USB drivers the past two days but cannot find one. Even Microsoft says its last update for USB 2 is in SP1.

I really appreciate your inputs. I still have to work on them as I'll really need that 2gb drive. It's campaign season in the Philippines and my work requires me to be mobile much of the time.

You need chipset drivers and possibly a bios update, both are available from Toshiba support. Post your notebook model.

Okay, NooNoo. I'll check the Toshiba site. Thanks very much for the help!

Couple other things it might be

1> If you are mapping drive letters for instance, then whatever it wants to use might already be taken. But I don't think this is it because it won't give you any error message when this happens. But what you would do is go to computer manager and then disk manager and change the drive letter for the device.

2> It could be that an inf file already exists that references the physical device driver for something else that it wants to use (kinda common when they use these generic unsigned drivers) and Windows won't allow it to be overwritten. This is kinda a tough one to fix actually. But what I would do is, plug in the device, go to hardware>device properties, find the yellow icon, right click on it and uninstall it. Remove the usb drive. Then stick it in a different usb port and see if that fixes it. If not, then you'll have to go find the inf file, open it up in notepad and find out which device it's trying to use. Then you have to remove that device driver somehow (could be several files actually).

Well, not sure if any of this helps, but good luck.

Hi Webhead. Thanks for the tip. I've tried sticking the flash drive into the other 3 usb ports (the laptop has 4). No luck. But I'll check the inf file. You're right, I've installed a lot of hardware using generic drivers. Still, I don't get it why my desktop PC with WinXP Pro and basically the same settings (except for the AMD processor) can recognize and use the 2gb drive.

To NooNoo, I tried downloading the BIOS and chipset drivers (Intel, as per the Toshiba website). Still won't work. It even refused to recognize my 256mb drive, so I had to turn to System Restore. But thanks for the suggestion. It was worth a try.

At the top of the usb/firewire forum is a sticky about a useful tool for solving problems such as this.... give it a go.