Drive Wiper Issue

I recently used Drive Wiper to delete files in a flash drive. It did that but also did something to the USB ports so that I am not able to access any USB flash drives. It does not recognize the drives in Windows.

When I insert a flash drive I get the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon but it doesn't show up in Windows Explorer. Odd thing is that my USB wireless mouse works.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad x60s, using Windows XP.

Any help to fix this would be appreciated.

Hello jmcgroove and welcome to the forum. If this USB flash drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, try opening Windows Disk Management and see if it appears there. If it does, it will probably be displayed as either unallocated or RAW format. If it's unallocated, right click the device and create a new simple volume, then format it FAT32. If it's RAW format, right click and delete the volume, creating unallocated space, then follow the previous directions. After doing so, it should show up again in Windows Explorer.

I think what happened was the wipe operation overwrote the FAT area on the USB flash drive, and Windows Explorer has a difficult time recognizing a drive without a file table.