Good flash drives not recognized

I have 10 or so flash drives that work fine on Windows 10 22H2. They are not recognized on any of my 3 Windows 11 24H2 PCs. I have 20 or so other flash drives that work fine on both. The non-working ones are generally older and generally smaller. Have other seen this behavior?

Have you tried disk management to see if they have a drive letter? If not assign one.

arrowd said:

I have 10 or so flash drives that work fine on Windows 10 22H2. They are not recognized on any of my 3 Windows 11 24H2 PCs. I have 20 or so other flash drives that work fine on both. The non-working ones are generally older and generally smaller. Have other seen this behavior?

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Hi and welcome.

billmcct said:

Have you tried disk management to see if they have a drive letter? If not assign one.

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This is good advice by Bill, to start with.

Can I ask you, what was on these flash drives?
Were they blank?
Did they previously hold install media for Windows?
Is there a common thread with what was on them prior to Windows 11?


Try reformatting them, but use Rufus. Rufus is free and is a portable app, no installation. It is widely used here to create Windows 11 install media, but it has quite a few other uses. Formatting is one of them.

• Open RUFUS
• Select the USB, if of course it can see the USB. This is possibly a problem due to your issues.
• Select Non bootable
• Click start

Let it format
Tell us how you went.

Good luck

Hi again. I amended the above post to say:

• Open RUFUS
• Select the USB, if of course it can see the USB. This is possibly a problem due to your issues.
• Select Non bootable
• Click start

Thanks for the suggestions. When a flash drive is reported as unrecognized, it doesn't show up in Disk manager and can't be formatted. I did cycle these through various PCs and reformatted them when I could. I have whittled the unusable ones down to five - which I will discard. One was a 32GB from Micro Center and the others were 4GB imprinted ones that were bought for a user group anniversary.

I have only one PC running Windows 10 remaining. All five of the 'bad' drives work fine in that PC. Maybe Windows 11 tightened up the USB protocol or something.

The 'bad' drives are about 15 years old and were either used to hold various different files or were virgin. Interestingly a couple of them worked OK in my two desktops (one with a Gigabyte MB and the other with an ASRock MB) but not in my new HP laptop. I don't want to worry about whether or not they will work in a particular PC so I will discard them.

What you could try is plugging in a non recognized device then go to device manager.
In device manager click on View at the top then select show hidden devices.
Now look at portable devices section and see if it shows unknown devices.
Uninstall unknown devices then see if drive is recognized.

arrowd said:

Thanks for the suggestions. When a flash drive is reported as unrecognized, it doesn't show up in Disk manager

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Yeah OK. Well to be frank, I said nothing about device manager. I did however take the time to explain how to use RUFUS.
You could have used RUFUS on another PC.
Regardless, 15 years old? Burn them.

I guess I'd have to see one or two of those that work on Win10 and don't work on Win11. AFAIK, there is no special "extra" protocol for accessing a USB thumb drive on Windows 11.

I went through all my box of old pen drives and tested the oldest ones, even a Simpletech Pininfarina designer case 2GB usb drive, they all work just fine on my Windows 11 computers. Some of those drives are at least 15 years old, they were "state of the art" when I got them.

gunrunnerjohn said:

I guess I'd have to see one or two of those that work on Win10 and don't work on Win11.

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I’ve seen a couple of posts about it in the past.