All of a sudden my laptop stopped allowing me to plug in a USB flashdrive and see it in File Explorer. I can see it if I reboot with it plugged in. Perhaps a Windows update caused this. Any suggestions for restoring hot swap? I have Windows 10 Home, 64 bit, Thinkpad E570. Thanks.
Jim
Insert the USB drive into a USB port.
Open Device Manager. Any yellow alerts of missing drivers?
Open Disk Manager (C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc). Does the USB drive has a drive letter?
Yes, Megahertz is correct in mentioning the drive letter.
It could help if you try changing the drive letter to another random letter. Sometimes 3rd party software can make the USB drive abit clunky and not work properly if you havnt safely removed the drive and ejected before data was written to it.
Good luck
Thanks. There are no yellow alerts in the Device Manager for missing or bad drivers. The Diskmanager shows no USB drive when a flash drive is plugged in.
Did you try another USB port?
Did you try the USB on another computer?
I did try another USB port but have not tried another computer yet. I did try several USB devices in the bad acting computer and all have the same issue. I will try a second computer. Thanks for the tip.
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Thanks Megahertz. I was just about to go to the Command Prompt to get to diskpart.
Jim
I am getting confused between My Computer and Diskpart, my bad. I'll delete all that crap i typed and sorry. Got so much in my head and getting carried away with copy and paste
Just take your time, my friend.
One more thing...
The convenience and the seeming simplicity of hot-swappable storage plays a trick to its users.
Pulling out a USB device or memory card pose a risk of data corruption if not done properly.
Why does that happen?
First, if you disconnect a storage device such as a USB flash drive at the time it was writing information, you will not only lose yet unwritten information but may also corrupt the entire flash storage.
However, even if you have a write indicator LED on your flash drive and it is not on, you may still have pending data to be written on that flash drive that is stored in the write cache.
If possible, use Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media -> bottom right in the System Tray.
I am careful to use the safely remove feature, but in full disclosure I did not do that when removing my digital camera. It did not harm the photos stored in the camera but I got some warning messages on my computer. I know I have never unsafely removed the flash drives and they do come up if plugged in when I boot up.
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