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Please help, flash drive not recognized

frozentundra123456

frozentundra123456

Lifer
Hi everyone, have a very strange problem with my main desktop system. It is a dell XPS, i5, with a HD7770 installed. I have a Sandisk Cruzer flash drive that the computer will not recognize. When I insert the drive the light on the drive flashes, but it does not show up in windows explorer. I copied the contents and reformatted in both FAT32 and NTFS, and it will still not show up. This computer is running Win 7. I have another flash drive that does show up properly in this computer.

What is really strange is that the cruzer flash drive that does not show up in the Dell is recognized by an older computer I have that is running Vista, and also by an atom tablet running Windows 8.

Does anyone have an idea what the problem could be, and if there is any way to solve it? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I dont know if there is something wrong with the flash drive or with the main computer, although it does recognize a different flash drive.
 
I have 3 Cruzers I use, too. Every once in a while one will hang like that and just flash at you. I don't really know what I did to fix it... maybe just unplugged it and put it in one of the mobo ports at the rear? It wasn't a permanent problem, though.

Does it do it in USB2 and/or USB3 plugs?
 
Charlie98 said:
I have 3 Cruzers I use, too. Every once in a while one will hang like that and just flash at you. I don't really know what I did to fix it... maybe just unplugged it and put it in one of the mobo ports at the rear? It wasn't a permanent problem, though.

Does it do it in USB2 and/or USB3 plugs?
Click to expand...

USB 2.0. It has always been a bit slow to show up, but not like this.
 
Well, I found some information on the internet. If I completely power off the computer and start it up with the drive in the port, it will see it. If I take it out and put it back in, then it does not see it. Simply restarting does not work either, you have to totally power down and restart.
 
frozentundra123456 said:
Well, I found some information on the internet. If I completely power off the computer and start it up with the drive in the port, it will see it. If I take it out and put it back in, then it does not see it. Simply restarting does not work either, you have to totally power down and restart.
Click to expand...

Seems a bit drastic... 😱

I wonder... is your USB driver up to date? It almost sounds like a motherboard/driver problem, not necessarily the drive.
 
We have always had issues with Sandisk drives here at my work, we use Dell PC's exclusively. Seems to have started somewhere around the OptiPlex 745 line. Never have figured out the issue.
 
Charlie98 said:
Seems a bit drastic... 😱

I wonder... is your USB driver up to date? It almost sounds like a motherboard/driver problem, not necessarily the drive.
Click to expand...

Could be. But the strange thing is that up until yesterday, the drive did work in that computer. It just stopped working in that computer, but still works in other computers, and a different flash drive, not SanDisk, works in the computer that won't see the cruiser. It seems like the driver got corrupted, but only for that one drive. Weird!!!
 
Did you set Device Manager to show non-present devices, and delete all the USB devices that are greyed out, including "Unknown" devices, and then try plugging it in again?

It may have once been miss-identified, and that's causing your problem.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Did you set Device Manager to show non-present devices, and delete all the USB devices that are greyed out, including "Unknown" devices, and then try plugging it in again?

It may have once been miss-identified, and that's causing your problem.
Click to expand...

No, I didn't. I am not sure I want to risk messing around with device manager. The next thing I think I will do is try system restore to the latest time it was working properly.
 
You have to really work to do any harm in Device Manager, and I don't think there's anything you can do on a USB drive from there that will not revert upon reboot, if not upon just removing the device.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all the advice guys. Larry, I tried you suggestion, but it did not work.

I finally did a system restore to just before the problem started and it seems to have solved the problem.
 
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