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I just replaced my SOs old Windows XP laptop with a new laptop that has Windows 7 installed on it.

The problem is with a flash drive. It works on the XP machine, it's drive letter is F, its name is "Francine". It works on my Linux Ubuntu computer.

The new Windows 7 machine has its hard drive partitioned in 3 parts, so drive letter F is assigned to the DVD drive.

When he or I put this flash drive in, it was not seen. Windows 7 did not note the conflict, nor give any options to resolve it.

We have tried taking the flash drive back to the XP machine and renaming it "Karen" with a driveletter of K, and bringing it back to the Windows 7 machine.

It still sees it as letter F, conflicting with the DVD drive, although it sees the new name of "Karen".

We have uninstalled and re-installed the driver for the flash drive. That appears to work, but nothing changes. The flash drive still cannot be used.

We have uninstalled and reinstalled the USB controller. Now the device is "not recognized", but it knows that something is there.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work? The other option would be to install a (spare) licensed copy of Windows XP pro on the new machine and be done with it.

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    I would have thought that the drive would use the next available drive letter? Alternatively you could try selecting a new drive letter under 'Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management' and select 'Disk Management' on the left hand side. You can then select your flash drive (or the current F: partition) right click and go "Change Drive Letter and Paths" Dec 28, 2012 at 5:28
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    The drive name/label (Francine/Karen) has no bearing on the issue, and is not connected to the drive letter in any way whatsoever. Also, nothing so drastic as going back to XP is required. Just assign a new drive letter as mentioned below, else worst case you can always repartition and reformat it in Windows 7.
    – Karan
    Dec 28, 2012 at 21:18

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You should be able to force map it using Disk Management. Go to Start>Run, then enter diskmgmt.msc

This will launch Disk Management, and you should be able to find the usb drive in the list of disks at the bottom. Right click on the partition, and you should be able to select "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." or determine why it's not getting assigned a drive letter.

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