You’ve probably run into a drive lettering conflict.

Possible Symptoms

  • At home, your PC sees your flash drive as drive letter E. (I’m using E as an example)
  • You go to work and plug in your USB stick, but it doesn’t show up.

The likely culprit

This is probably because your PC at work already has a Drive E assigned – Windows can’t have two drives with the same drive letter, so your Flash drive can’t be used. To use it, we need to change the drive letter assigned to the flash stick.

How to fix it

  1. Right click on My Computer.
  2. Click ‘Manage’.
  3. Click ‘Disk Management’ in the Left pane.
  4. Locate your flash stick in the right pane.
  5. Right click on it, and choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths…’.
  6. Click either Change or Add, and assign the drive a new letter. (I usually pick something high up the alphabet, like ‘R’)
  7. Ta-da! Your Flash drive should now appear 🙂