USB flash drives stopped working in Vista.

Any time I plug in a flash drive it doesn't appear in My Computer or disk manager, but it appears in Devive Manager with a yellow flag on it. When I click status it says "(Code 32).". I've only been able to find solutions for this on XP. Does anyone know how to fix this on Vista? I've tried disabling then reenabling and uninstalling and reinstalling, but I get the same problem. It is happening with two different brands of USB drives and in all 4 USB ports.


Also unrelated, but is there any way to reinstall XP and keep all of my programs and files? I am unable to boot into my XP partition after making sure all of the boot config is correct and going through all of the troubleshooting.

 

just insert your XP disc, hit install...select the same partition as the current one and if asked, say you want to reinstall.

 

And that will keep all of my programs and other files, right? IE, not a clean install?

 

Can anyone confirm this? I really want to get this working tonight, and I don't want to lose all of my files since my backup drive is full.

 

Well, you wont be reinstalling XP - that would possibly delete the lot...

You need to repair - but even if you repair sucessfully, its possible that some software stops working.

 

How do I do this? Last night when I was testing it out it told me that it detected an earlier installation, and it would overwrite all of the system files and possibly things like My Documents. Is this the "repair" feature mentioned, or is that just going to wipe everything in a system folder?

 

It shouldn't - but that doesn't mean it won't change the registry or links so that software will no longer work...

Best thing: Get the data of the drive and start from scratch I think...

 

I'm actually in the process of doing this, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't my last option.