Disk Management, for disk issues formating and memory sticks/drives not showing in my computer

The most useful thing about Disk Manager is that if you have a memory stick that is not showing when you plug it in you might find that it is simply not assigned a drive letter so read on and you will find out how to check if the system can see the device and if it is assigned a drive letter.

Disk Management is a snap in that is part of the Microsoft Management Console supplied with Windows XP Vista and Win 7

Accessing Windows Disk Management

• Press and hold the windows button and then press R, this brings up the run box. Now type diskmgmt.msc in the Open: line and click OK. The Disk Management snap-in will open.

now you have done this you can see that the drives in your system, if you are looking for a memory stick then look for the 4gig (for example) drive and see if it is assigned a drive letter. if it has no drive letter then right click on it and  select change drive letter now you can assign a letter to the drive.

Other Basic Disk Management Functions

• Mark partitions as active.
• Create partitions, logical drives, and volumes.
• Delete partitions, logical drives, and volumes.
• Format partitions and volumes.
• Assign or modify drive letters for hard disk volumes, removable disk drives, and CD-ROM drives.
• Overview of the properties of all disks and volumes in the system.
• Create mounted drives on systems using the NTFS or FAT file system.
• Convert disks to dynamic disks.
• Create a number of specialty volumes including spanned, striped, mirrored, and RAID-5.

Right clicking on a drive or partition will normally present a menu that contains the options and procedures available for the particular device some can be destructive so be careful.