Defender device returning “Device is not ready yet” error message and secure drive is not mounting (Windows XP)

My Defender device is giving me error messages like “Device is not ready yet”, and my secure drive is not mounting.

Please note: This article only applies if the Defender's CD-ROM partition is recognized but not the secure partition. If you plug in your Defender drive and neither the CD-ROM partition nor the secure drive partition are recognized by your computer then you are experiencing a separate issue. Please contact Kanguru Solutions Technical Support for more help.


This is a known problem that Windows XP has with any USB storage device. The problem is that Windows does not see network or subsystem drives when mapping new drive letters, so it maps on top of them. Your new storage device will not work correctly until you manually change its drive letter.

Full text can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694/en-us


Fixes for this issue:

• Change your networked drive letters.

A good method for mapping network drives is to assign the first network drive as Z:, and then the next as Y:, and then X: and so on, to avoid mapping over the same drive letter.

• Manually change the mapped drive letter via Windows Disk Management.

This is a bit involved and requires technical knowledge, but once the PC recognizes that you have changed the drive letter it will remember the drive letter each subsequent time as well. You need to do this once per drive for any PC it will be connected to.

• Microsoft has issued a Hotfix for this problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=297694&kbln=en-us

The Hotfix requires an install and reboot before it can take effect. Testing results show that this Hotfix works but is inconsistent. It works best when a drive is plugged into a PC for the first time. This will correctly map the drive letters most of the time.

• Finally there is a 3rd party application called USBDLM that may help fix this problem:

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

USBDLM was written to address this exact problem with Windows. The application can be downloaded directly from their website and is available for personal use free of charge. The application requires an install on your clients and a .txt file on each drive. The client reads attributes on the .txt file to know what letter to map it to. It is fairly simple and is explained very well on their website.

If none of these solutions fixes your problem, please contact Kanguru Technical Support at 508-376-4245.

Note: This article only applies to the Windows XP operating system. If you are running Windows 7 and cannot see the secure drive partition, please refer to the following article: https://kanguru.zendesk.com/index.php?action=kb&article=77

In line with Microsoft’s End-of-Support announcementfor Windows XP™, Kanguru Solutions is ending support for its line of products running on the Windows XP platform. While our devices have been quality tested internally on Windows XP, we cannot guarantee normal operation on an unsupported OS. Please consult your system administrator for an OS upgrade.