USB drive disappears on my laptop...

/usr

Well, I have an iPod shuffle which also doubles as a USB drive. When I connect it to my laptop, the drive will appear, but will disappear abruptly around 15-20 seconds after. However, the device is still being recognized, because I can delete/add songs via iTunes.

I can connect the iPod to my desktop here at work and it works just fine.

Any ideas?

keatron

Could this be a drive letter assignment issue?

In the computer management console, select "disk manager" and see if it shows up there.

mobri09

Some times the ipods conflict as a network map drive and you have to reassign the drive letter, but most of the time the problem is probably related to updates. You have to update your ipod with the ipod updater program you download from apple.

/usr

If it needed updated, wouldn't the problem occur on all machines?

RussS

Ahhh, the mysterious disappearing USB device ....

What sort of rating is your power supply? How many devices do you already have on the system?
I have come a cross many USB devices that draw too much power from the system to run correctly. My current Gigabyte board does it all the time when using the built in USB ports unless I remove a few things first. If however I use the ports on my PCI expansion card (which has a supply direct from the PSU) everything works great except for one of my USB hard drive caddies and that ALWAYS needs external power.

/usr

The iPod is the only USB device connected at any given time.

I'm using a laptop and to be honest, I don't what the power supply is rated at. I've never even bothered to check...but I would assume that isn't the issue, considered it worked before.

Would the fact that it's running on batteries have anything to do with it? Now that I think about it, I've never actually checked to see if it worked while plugged in.

RussS

I had a laptop at work a few months ago with a USB music device that would not be recognised unless it had batteries in it. The fact that it had been recognised before is an issue though. Is it possible that then it had fully charged batteries?

/usr

Well, the thing is, I never really noticed it before.

I'll try it here in a bit with it plugged in, just to see if the drive will stay up.

/usr

No luck. It disappears after a few seconds, even when plugged in.