Computer does not recognize USB drive that other computers access with no problem.

Satsumomo

Hey all,

So I'm trying to install Ubuntu from a USB stick onto another machine, and at one point, I used Aomei partition manager to set the USB stick to be ext2. Something went wrong so I bring the stick back to this Windows 10, use Aomei to reformat to NTFS, but the computer now does either of these two things:

- Doesn't show up at all, except for in the Disk Manager (With no letter assigned, but I can't do any actions to it, because Windows will say "Cannot access the file")
- Show up as E: but I cannot access it.

So yeah, weird. I boot up my Windows 7 laptop and and plug the USB drive there, and bam, it shows up, I can copy files and do anything with it. Huh. So well I use the Windows formatting tool, and set it to FAT32, bring it back to the Windows 10 computer, and same results. Went back, reformatted to NTFS and still no luck.

I've tried 3 different USB ports on this computer (3 different chipsets for each) and they all yield the same results, even after rebooting. Any idea why this is happening? I can put in other USB sticks and they work fine, this one just simply refuses to work.

Thanks in advance.

bowen

Try another USB port to make sure it's not some weird USB1/2/3 compatibility thing first.

Satsumomo

Yes, tried 3 different ports, my computer has 3 different USB chipsets (One's 3.0, the others are 2.0)

mts

how big is the drive?

my pc had trouble detecting my large usb with win 10 and I had to manually assign a letter to it

Satsumomo

It's 32GB. It was working fine with no problems, until I decided to give it EXT partitions with Aomei Partition manager.

Edit: Wait no, it started when I used UnetBootin 6.13 to create the bootable USB drive.

Satsumomo

Yay! Remembering that UnetBootin was what started all this led me to the solution!

This worked for me on windows, in the prompt window enter the following:

$diskpart
$list disk

you'll see the disks that the system recognizes, one should be the hard drive and the other the usb flash drive. In my case disk 1 was the usb flash drive.

$select disk 1
$clean

$create partition primary

$exit

This prompted a bunch of error messages where the drive couldn't be found, but then asked me if I wanted to reformat, I did, and bam, it's working now.

bowen

Ahh bootable partitions are definitely an issue I guess!

Satsumomo

So weird that only this PC wouldn't read it though!