Here's Why USB Drives Disappear in Windows Sometimes (+ How to Fix)

This ever happen to you? It Will...

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro & Reasons
1:18 - Windows Disk Manager Explained
2:36 - Fix #1 - If No Drive Letter
3:25 - Fix #2 - If No or Bad Partition
5:30 - Fix #3 - Unrecognized (But Valid) Filesystem
6:55 - Fix #4 - Drive Not Initialized
8:45 - Useful Program: USBLogView

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[ThioJoe]

NOTE: Most thumb drives these days are probably best formatted as "exFAT", because FAT32 only supported up to 4GB file sizes. UNLESS you want absolutely maximum compatibility on really old computers (~2010 and earlier OS's like Mac OSX 10.6 or Windows XP). In this demo it didn't offer me exFAT as an option because the drive was too small.

So shout out to my absolutely ancient 247 MB thumb drive, still going strong after like 15 years.

[Guaranteed_Bonk]

Me : *Plugs in a usb*

Windows : *Im gonna pretend I didnt detect that.*

[todd]

The bigger question is, where did you find a 250MB drive at? You can also see the drives that have been plugged in through device manager.

[pyp]

I've had that happen a lot. But what makes it work is I just close and re-open, or click on the refresh icon. And it does work most of the time.

[srivatsavm]

ThioJoe doesn't agree Terms and Conditions with Windows.
Windows agrees with him.

[World_of_OSes]

1:38 - To get to Disk Management you could also right click the Start button then click 'Disk Management'.

[BlenderRookie]

There's a 5th reason. If you have a USB hdd plugged into a desktop on a home network and that USB drive is shared on the network and if let's say a laptop on the same network has that USB hdd "mapped as a network drive" as in it's assigned a drive letter but it's being accessed through the network, then if you physically remove the USB drive from the desktop and plug it directly into the laptop, that will confuse the bejeezus out of windows. Often the drive will not be accessible until the mapped network drive is "disconnected" and then the USB drive will need unplugged and then plugged back in. Sometimes you will need to disconnect the mapped network drive and then restart the PC before it will accept the USB drive plugged directly into it.

[davidanderson]

There is a fifth problem I kept encountering until I figured out what was causing it.
I plug in a USB stick, and it does not even come up in Disk Manager. When I go to Device Manager > USB Controllers, I find that one of the USB Storage Device Icons had a small grey exclamation mark on it. I right click on it, click "Enable" and the USB drive pops up straight away. There are a few reasons this can happen, but one of them is when you insert and then remove a USB stick too quickly. As it turned out, the cause of my problem was a worn out USB socket - when I plug in the drive, it briefly connects and then when I let go of the stick, it would disconnect, and that was disabling the USB port. I replaced the USB socket panel, and the problem stopped happening.

[ltecheroffical]

Me; *Inserts usb*
Windows: Windows pretended not to notice
Windows: Windows is loafing around
Windows: Windows defeyed orders
Windows: Windows fell asleep

[ashl]

I've been searching for a resolution to this issue i've had for a few days with no clear idea - most places were attempting to get me to download programs ect, this was so simple and straightforward thank you!

[ianl]

Oddly enough, I had the same problem a couple of times after my penultimate Linux Mint 19.1 update. Since updated to 19.2. So far, no problems.

[Uniblab]

WOW! This just validated the way I have gone about all of this to get the thumb drive recognized. Thanks.

[desertgecko]

Thanks, Joe. And nice update to old XP wallpaper.

[masterofyeet]

I know this but I still watched this all the way through cause you're the man

[kevinhawthorne]

Thank You for all of your videos that you did. I am enjoying all of them

[pmccarthy]

I've got a pair of older WD USB hard drives that I got totally sick of connecting to the computer anymore b/c they change the boot order. Windows tries to boot from the WSB USB hard drive... Windows gets confused, runs System Repair, but it doesn't know what's going on and can't solve the problem. When it first happened it took me a while to figure it out, but you need to go into the BIOS and put the (internal) hard drive with Windows on it to the top of the boot order again. But, if I keep the WD USB hard drive connected to the computer it'll just do it again... Any idea of how to resolve this issue? Is this something with the WD USB hard drive?

[donald-parker]

Useful. I noticed you were rather casual with your formatting recommendations, but there are are some simple, important considerations. If you want a volume greater than 32 GB you pretty much have to use NTFS. Same if you want to store a file larger than 4GB. The error message you get when you try to copy a file bigger than 4GB to a FAT32 USB drive is confusing - it would have you believe there is no room on the drive, even if you know it has plenty of space.

[josephjr]

This channel explains things soo clearly that i feel I don't need to watch any other tech channels to figure out about the topic told here 😁😁

[daryllarsen]

I find the most common cause is simply an insecure connection. Not plugged in all the way or being a bit cockeyed. Unplugging the drive and plugging it back in usually fixes it.

[ravenclawavenger]

I have a problem sometimes on Android where a disk gets corrupted. This is less likely to occur if sudden, forced shutdowns are avoided.. (Avoid forcing a shutdown by holding in the power button until the device shuts down.) Avoid letting the device battery run down so that it goes into a state of shutdown. For extra piece of mind unmount the SD card from settings. The reboot or shutdown the device.