Strange USB anomaly: "Unknown Device"

[BonzaiDuck]

What brought me to here was that my usb key worked last night but in the morning when I plugged it in the file sys went from FAT32 to RAW and the device manager the same "unknown Device" listed with the ESA FW Update.

I dont know if the 2 are connected or not. I'm still learning.

You have a motherboard with the nVidia chipset and the ESA fan-controller? Supposedly, there was a Dell machine sold in the last few years that had both nVidia motherboard and SOME sort of ESA fan controller.

We're sort of on the cusp with this: it's either a Windows 7 problem per legacy motherboards, or it's a minor hardware failure.

In your case, there's a third possibility that your flash-drive went south. If you could READ the flash drive or "see" its format, it could either be the flash drive or the port. I must assume that flash-drives can fail, although you wouldn't expect it to happen often. You might try plugging it in to another port and see what happens.

In my case, I found the failed port. I can plug in a known functional device, and it doesn't show up. It shows up on the other ports that aren't being used.