Windows 7 Home Premium Question

I have an older laptop, Model HP Presario CQ62, running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit that is not reading any of my USB flash drives. Under My Computer, it is showing three hard disk drives: Local Disk (C, RECOVERY (D, and HP_TOOLS (E, and one device with removable storage, DVD RW Drive (F. How do I create a new lettered drive, most likely (G, so my laptop will recognize flash drives? This system is my backup computer, so it doesn't have a lot of RAM (a mere 2.00 GB) or storage (218 GB with 170 GB of free space.)

 

It should be recognized automatically by Windows so it sounds like something is corrupted. Try running USBDeview (64 Bit) and see if there are any flash drives in the list. If so then right-click them and Uninstall. You may need to restart the computer and then plug in the flash drive and see if Windows recognizes it.

 

This utility has fixed the problem for me in the past:

USB Oblivion utility is designed to erase all traces of USB-connected drives and CD-ROMs from the registry in Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 32/64-bit versions.​

After all history of the flash drive was erased, Windows discovered it all over again, and the drive worked as expected. Be sure to read the ReadMe.txt file before running it.

 

Thanks guys! Windows wasn't recognizing the flash drives because the drivers were corrupted. I rolled them back, then reinstalled. Solved the problem! Now to increase storage capacity and add some RAM to this dinosaur! Thanks again for the advice/help!