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.

Me : *Plugs in a usb* Windows : *Im gonna pretend I didnt detect that.*

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

Thanks, ThioJoe, You just solved a major headache for me, after weeks of searches and attempts I came across your video and what I had been looking for, What it is I bought a new flash drive and I did add on some information then when I went to use it all I got was the sound like you said but no reaction from the drive, I did as you said and one of your recommendations did the trick, it was not about the cost of the new flash drive but not being able to use it within such a short time span after purchasing it, Thanks for the great information.

Thank you so much!!! Just what i was looking for this fixed my corrupted USB which kept crashing my computer when i tried to Access it. After watching many videos all about diskpart and failing, i finally found something helpful, thank you. Keep up the good work👍!

Dude you are my #1 digital savior! You do great work! Thank you!

Thank you Theo Joe for making this video it helped me a lot I had tried to upload a new operating system onto my drive D and somehow screwed it up an lossed access to the drive your tutorial here help me fix that and now the driver's back so thank you so much.

Thank you. One of your more useful videos for me anyways. I feel like gathering up all my old usb's and seeing what I can do. I have a few old external HD's too that i think I might be able to get going again. thanks.

Great troubleshooting video! Thanks!

this was super helpful, thank you!

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

Good info. Thanks.

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.

Great info. Thanks.

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.

Great stuff dude.

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.

Thanks a lot Joe. Almost got rid of an external hard drive 👍

Was very useful thankyou

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.

I didn't know about the "Initialize disk" option. I used to launch MiniTool Partition manager to format those ones. Good to know that Windows can format those external drives as well.

Hey ThioJoe I love your videos I have a question do you think you can make a video about what is on your computer like what kind of apps you use and I have 1 more question what kind of computer do you use?

Well thank you for posting a fix on some problem i had 3 weeks ago,my school files are saved because of this :)

I have had that happen on my Mac too, so it's not just Windows computers, although I have always been able to fix the problem either by running disk utilities, or Disk Drill.

Hi ThioJoe! I really love your vids it's so highly informative. I have a humble suggestion; will you make a video regarding on the "refresh" and what's all behind it? when we right click and hit refresh it's sometimes fix problems, it also became an innate nature for a normal person to just hit refresh whenever the pc starts or just on random times. thanks!

AAAAHHHH, I needed this video but I can't find my thumbstick!!!! the frustration is off limits!!! cool video tho

Never has this issue(s) but is a keeper for the future👍

Smarter everyday, thanks. 😁👍.

This will help me lot 💕👌

It really helps thanks alot

Forget that, how do you stop the right mouse button randomly clicking itself? I think I've inadvertently turned on some feature or other that make is do that, but I don't know how I did it. I can't find it anywhere in my mouse options.

Great Video! 🙂

thanks man, first solution works for me

i follow your lead step by step and its great ,,thank you thank you !!!!

Fixed! Thanks man

You make such cool videos even though i use a mac

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

Did you try turning it on and off ?

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.

Amazing video

I have a similar recurring issue, where USB drives that worked before seem to disconnect themselves. Reconnecting does nothing. I figured out that disabling and re-enabling the USB 3.0 Root Hub device in Device Manager fixes the issue - at least temporarily (a few days to a few weeks).

Oh man, I had this exact same problem a few months ago when I was messing with a Fedora install on my usb drive. Afterwards I set it back to "factory default" and it stopped appearing in Windows Explorer... Disk Manager was throwing errors on it, and it took well over an hour of deleting the partition, recreating, reformating, deleting again, until I finally got it to appear and I could reformat it through Windows Explorer.

hey joe, i have a external hard disk that cannot get recognise by window after window 11 update. what should i do?

thanks for this,

Dude thanks so much

Hi Joe, this is a great video on for USB thumb drives. I have a question and problem with my Windows 11 computer. I have a couple of large 1TB and a 2TB thumb drives that I would like to have multiple partitions on. I tried AIMEI partition manager and Windows but even though I can create multiple partitions Windows will not let me see them. I understand that Windows did not support multiple USB drive partitions until Windows 10, but i am running Windows 11. I can't seem to find out if Windows 11 supports USB multi-partition drives or if that upgrade only applied to Windows 10. If you know how to fix this problem on Windows 11 i would really like to know, Thanks ---Ron

problem #2 did the gob that is very good helped a lot 👌👌

Good information

Thanks so much it does work cause my other half was unallocated

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 😁😁

I've seen the issue occur if the drive has been assigned a particular drive letter then removed. Another drive is attached and currently has the drive letter assigned to the removed drive. When the removed drive is reconnected, it won't show up since it's assigned drive letter is already in use. If you don't assign a drive letter, but just let it get the default next drive letter, then this isn't an issue. In this case, if the drive is reconnected, it gets a different drive letter since it's first drive letter is now in use.

Do you have a video that covers what to do if you have a USB that will open, shows up, I can navigate to it and open it - see files - but then within a few seconds it automatically closes back down? If I want the files I have to be really fast and right click - copy and go to desktop and right click - paste to get anything off of it! It is a CF card in a USB card reader and it happens with two different readers. I never had any issues with readers or cards until I got a new computer with Windows 11. I think it might be a setting like USB power management or something but I can't seem to find where that setting might be located to turn things on/off. Any suggestions?

What do we do if the disk is showing up as a removable like your Disk 7 and Disk 8, with no volumes to interact with?

You can also hide and restrict drives in the registry / group policy which malware can implement

huge thank you

Something happened to my pendrive and it stopped working. I can hear the sound the computer makes when you plug in a drive to the USB port, but it does not show up in the partition manager in any of my computers. I can’t Imagine why suddenly it stopped working

Great video.

What about if it's a flash stick and shows up as (letter) MEMORY BAR and does indeed tell you how much is used and free but when you try to access it won't open and is unaccessable?

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.

I am encountering issues when i open my drive bay. Sometimes windows easily reads the drives but now its having hard time reading them and it is being disconnected on its own as well from time to time. How can i fix this? Thanks.

That exactly the video I was hoping for but I have a usb that has a similar problem but the cache is that, when I connect the usb I plays the sound of the removable media but in the device manager it says "no media" No unlocated, no drive letter problem just no media

#Microsoft needs to hire you. I swear. You are like Microsoft’s biggest cheerleader on KZfaq. ❤️👍🏼

Dude you’re a legend

I watched greg salazar's latest video where he tried to fix a viewer's pc. The SSD he dealt with was detected but couldn't be initialized. (In the end diagnosed as dead) How would you have dealt with it? Thanks

thank you that works well.

Hi, I have situation that you have not described. What to do with DISK 8 on your video? USB inserted, pc gave sound, but in disk management stay description like for DISK8 in your video? thank you.

also, there was a case with my USB drive, where Windows played the device plug in sound, but the device itself was not working properly basically, Windows recognized the microcontroller, but the microcontroller was not able to communicate with the NAND (where the actual data is) so Windows thought I plugged in a 0MB flash drive :D and don't worry, I didn't have anything important on that flash drive, and had good backups :)

You deserve 1 billion likes

How’d you manage to get your computer to recognize all those drives at once? I try to plug in multiple external hard drives and my computer will only be able to recognize one at a time. Really stressful when I wanna transfer data between the 2 (or more) drives and can’t do it because my pc can’t recognize more than one at a time. Any suggestions?

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?

Amazing content video, Thio Can you do a video about (UnSafely Remove Hardware and Eject (HDD Ex or USB))

Sometimes I had partitions created by Linux or Mac that Windows Disk Management couldn't delete. To fix that I open "diskpart" do "list disk" to identify the drive, "select drive x" where x is the ID I found with list disk and then "clean" which will remove all partitions and all data. After that I can create a new volume in Disk Management.

I wonder if the people working on Windows 11 are aware of this problem. If not, are you able to inform them? You should be working as a free-lancer for them. BTW , this and all your videos are great. Thanks.

Do you have any suggestions for the case where the drive is marked "RAW" and essentially "vanishes" when trying to wipe, delete volume, etc.?

Thx big dawg I had a yellow clear 128gb USB stick making sound but never came up on my desktop but on my laptop running same windows 10 pro 22h2 on both machines but the dam desktop wouldn't see it so you fixed it drive letter is now Y: and now I'm good. Thx brother

But what do you do when you plug in the usb and it explodes...?

I have one I've seen many times, being in corporate IT for 25 years: Windows assigns the drive a drive letter the same as a network mapped drive. Let's say Windows gets a new drive and assigns it the "H" drive letter. Well, in many corporate environments. H: is assigned to the user's home drive. Suddenly, the drive isn't showing up, and the user has no idea what's going on. Going into drive manager and changing the drive assignment manually will clear it up. I've seen this too many times to count.

thio i saw some people convert their (C DRIVE) File path MBR to GPT.. what happen after we do it ? ? ? if you can pls create a video about that.. Thanks

Nice. Although there's one issue I'm facing. The drive was not initialised, and when I try to, an error came out and Windows failed to initialised the disk. My friend told me the drive is not working, so could it be it is totally dead? Also, the total disk space is 0MB. Usually, even if the disk is not initialised, the total disk space will listed depends on drive's capacity, but this one just list 0MB.

It gets really hard when you have a lian li pc o11 xl, because then you have all 4 hot swaps filled, and on the back panel you have all 3 drives installed and you have m.2 slots filled. It makes it hard to know what drive is what with exception of the m.2 being c:

I have the "No Media" problem, the sound plays, but in my case is a corrupted controller problem, but i never could fix it with a lot of solutions i found on the internet

What do you do if dicover your drive doesnt have a letter but that option is not clickable in Disk Management to change the letter/path?

I've had yet another issue where Windows persisted in assigning a drive letter that was already in use by a network drive. Can also be solved using Disk Management.

Hey I had a thumb drive and disk manager was not loading and as I plugged it out disk manager loaded up

Do you have a good fix for iSCSI drive that disappear and must be disconnected and reconnectedÉ

In cases where flash drives ate not responding to these tactics is there any good apps to recover data from them??

Turned out my external hard drive was just offline lmao. Thanks for the video cause for sure i was getting frustrated .

I have a 5tb Seagate external HDD that I have files on and actually I had two other externals of the same size and brand but different models with files as well hooked to my laptop with a unpowered USB Hub that always worked. The two later drives I mentioned that were different from the first drive are both powered drives that require being plugged in and the first isn't. For some reason the first won't show up on windows but is showing in the storage notification on the task bar in the bottom left corner and in the network and devices section. When I check properties it says it is working fine but it won't let me open it to see any of the files and diagnostics on it says it can't find the problem. So what do I do to recover it without losing the files? I have over 200 tv shows on it for my Plex server that I really don't want to lose.

Good video

I thought this would be about USB drives disappearing that were already showing. I keep getting write errors randomly and find the drive I'm using just disappeared. Have to unplug and re-plug the USB connection to get it back.

#Question - I have a similar problem. I have a USB device which has ready boost on it and whenever I keep it connected to my laptop for a long time, it disconnects automatically and I have to reconnect it back.

I just began watching the video and up to 40 seconds on your video time, the stuff you describe is familiar, happening to me frequently enough. It seems to not really be much problem. I just wait a while and the icon for the usb drive does show; or I pull in out, wait several seconds, and plug in again, and in a short moment the icon for the usb drive does appear (in File Explorer).

the drive letter unassignement can occur if you don't safely eject the USB so, always safely eject your USB drives

3:01 at this part when i click change drive letters , it says ERROR . can you help me with that because i tried everything and i think my usb is now broken like COMPLETELY BROKEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! .