I installed a virtual drive and was so excited with it, that I used all the drives allowed (from G to Z?) for the virtual drive. Then I noticed when I plug my flash disk in, it wasn't shown in the explorer page. The problem persisted though I disabled the virtual drive and even uninstalled it. I had to uninstall Windows XP to get rid of it.

Do you think it was the virtual drive which caused the problem?

With the drive not there it should have allowed the flash drive to run again. I can only think that there was a bug somehow. I'm curious though, what is it that you installed?

Go to My Computer and right click. Select Manage. From the computer management window, select Disk Management. See if your flash drive appears in the list. It's possible that the flash drive has been assigned a drive letter that already exists and that's why you can't see it. If that's the case, right click the flash drive and select Change Drive letter to give it a different letter.

If uninstalling everything doesn't work then it could be a problem with your flash drive. Have you tried it on another computer to make sure it is working?