Windows 10 windows 10 wont play with USB flash drives

Mick Newman

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Aug 8, 2015
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Hi I have 2 days ago upgraded from windows 7 home . all went smoothly but now no matter what , i cant get Windows to recognize any of four usb flash drives . Mouse, keyboard , printer , phone cord all connect thru usb and work fine but not flash drives .What can I do?
Message from windows is " USB Device not recognized . The last device you connected has malfunctioned ,and windows does not recognize it "
 
Upgrading from Windows 7 may be a special situation, since Windows 7 did not originally have USB 3.0 drivers included.

USB flash drives are a little different in that they need to work with the formatting schemes in Windows 10. I have seen that same message many times, and even after only switching from a Windows 7 system back to a Windows 10 system.

If you have an empty one to play with it would be nice but try ignoring the message to see if it will eventually work itself out after the system has time to index the drives.

You may also see such messages as "not accessible" when you go to some network locations. Subsequent tries to access may work.
 
If the ports are on a separate card check the manufacturer's site for updates and drivers. A lot of people ran into that when they added USB 3 to Windows 7.
Joe
 
There is no opportunity to ignore the message as it appears it is identifying a failure to connect . In "Device Manager" I get a listing in the list of USB Controllers with the yellow triangle and exclamation mark and it reads "Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) This is common for all four flash drives .
 
Joe S said:
If the ports are on a separate card check the manufacturer's site for updates and drivers. A lot of people ran into that when they added USB 3 to Windows 7.
Joe
Click to expand...
Are you suggesting I try reloading Motherboard Drivers?
 
Where were the drives formatted? What type of formatting do they have? Any special software which might have come with the drives? Are they all the same type/model?
 
Saltgrass said:
Where were the drives formatted? What type of formatting do they have? Any special software which might have come with the drives? Are they all the same type/model?
Click to expand...
I have and older pair of toshiba which are 1 and 4 gb capacity also an Imation 16 gb and the last is Strontium 16 gb . These are all working fine on anything as of last week . None have any additional software(security or otherwise) on them and the primary function is music or video storage and transfer. Not sure what you mean by formatting but they have all been formatted at some stage . I have a HP laptop running win 7 available which still considers them as functional.
 
Well, all I might suggest is to take one of the 16 GB drives, or a new one, and format the partition in Windows 10 using Disk Management. Then see if it operates correctly in all your OSes.

You can format it using NTFS or FAT32, but NTFS will hold larger files.

All of my USB devices seem to work normally. But they have been running on Windows 8, so not much of a jump to Windows 10.
 
The ntfs file system in xp, vista and 7 is different to whats in 8 and above... I still think it strange that wx can't read them but perhaps the music folders think they belong to an itunes account?

I'm with Saltgrass, a test format is the next logical step
 
ok thanks for that , I have a friend who runs Win 8 at the moment and I know his system recognizes them so i might pay him a visit and try formatting them on his system . Am I correct in understanding that file system fat32 or NTFS may be switched with this process ?
 
Yes mate, fat32 and ntfs are file options you set when formatting.
 
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