Maximum PC

This past week, I worked on a computer that belonged to one of my supervisors at work. It was a Dell Dimension 3000 system that had a Windows XP Home Edition SP3 OS that was so heavily infected with malware that I had to manually back up all of the personal data on the drive and use the hidden restore partition on the drive to completely wipe the drive clean and reset it to factory condition and restore the data from there. One of the flash drives that I backed up the personal data on was a Patriot Xpress 32 GB USB 3.0 flash drive that I purchased last year. This drive had several system files on it that were part of that data. When I attempted to connect the flash drive to my Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop (which has Windows XP Pro SP3 as its OS) via one of its USB 2.0 ports, the flash drive made a quick connect/disconnect sound, and never appeared in the My Computer window as an accessible drive. There was also no "Safely Remove Hardware" icon showing in the System Tray to indicate that this drive was connected to my laptop. So I pulled the Patriot XPress flash drive from that USB 2.0 port and tried it on a different USB 2.0 port and received the exact same result. So I disconnected it from the USB 2.0 port on the Toshiba laptop and connected it to a USB 2.0 port on my homebuilt desktop computer that has Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as its OS, and the Patriot XPress flash drive made the normal connect sound in Windows 7 and showed as an accessible drive in the Computer window of Windows 7. When I went to delete the system files on the drive, it gave me a warning stating that if I were to delete them, Windows might not function properly,..blah, blah, blah. Knowing that these were system files from a completely different OS, I went ahead and deleted them without issue or consequence and managed to get all the available usable space back on the flash drive.

My question is this: Why would this drive be detected properly when I connected it to both the computer that I backed up the data from (so I could restore the data back to the computer) and to my Windows 7 desktop system, but not to my laptop? Any ideas?

Did the flash drive work properly with the laptop before? I've seen some flash drives not connect properly with the USB port and cause problems similiar to what you're seeing. Also, is it listed in Device Manager?

Yes, the flash drive worked before with the USB 2.0 ports on my laptop. I used it to back up some of my own personal data on the laptop when I had to restore it after discovering that I had a faulty 2 GB memory module. I should also add that the drive works properly in my other desktop computer that has Windows XP Pro SP3 on it as well. This particular flash drive is the only one that I currently possess (I have a total of 10 flash drives) that is NTFS-formatted. Also, all of my other drives appear to be detected and work normally with the laptop's USB 2.0 ports.

Edit: I don't know if this might be a factor, but I just checked the drive and found that it has a file titled "System Volume Information" (I don't recall seeing it on the drive when I first used it) that I seemingly cannot delete as it tells me "Access denied".

System Volume Information is created by System Restore. Usually System Restore doesn't touch flash drives but yours might because its NTFS.

Does Device Manager list it?

On both desktop computers, it does. As it does not properly detect my flash drive on the laptop, it does not. The funny thing is (and I failed to mention this in my original post), when I remove the flash drive from the USB port on my laptop, it does make the disconnect sound. WTF?

Edit: I just removed the System Volume Information file using Unlocker 1.9.1, but the Patriot flash drive still exhibits the same problem with my laptop's USB 2.0 ports. I think I may need to restore my laptop again as I am unable to boot from an OCZ Diesel 16 GB flash drive that has the Norton Bootable Recovery Tool installed on it. When I restored my laptop, I did so before finding that I had a bad memory module in my laptop.

Update: It appears as though my OS was corrupted. When I backed up my laptop's data, and restored the laptop back to factory condition, updated Windows, and reinstalled my programs and restored my personal data, the flash drive is now properly detected and is running fine in Windows XP Pro again.