I’m having problems with a USB 3.0 flash drive being recognized by my system.
I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. The drive is a SanDisk Extreme 64 GB stick. My m/b is XFX Nforce 780I SLI LGA775—an old one now, and it only has USB 2.0 ports. My understanding is that USB 3.0 devices should all be backwards compatible with USB 2.0, which makes sense. The only reason I got a USB 3.0 device is because I expect to be upgrading my computer (finally) within a few months.
When I plug the drive into my computer, Windows installs the drivers successfully. The blue LED flashes once when you plug it in, and again after the drivers are installed. But the drive shows up with 0 capacity and 0 free space, and if you click on it in Explorer, it says “Please insert a disk into Removable Drive H:”. Very helpful.
Device Manager reports the device under Disk Drives as a SanDisk Extreme USB device.
If I take the same USB drive and put it in other systems, on either USB 2.0 or 3.0 ports, it works properly, leading me to conclude that it is my system and not the drive that is the problem. The blue LED flashes the same as it does on my computer.
I went so far as to purchase a SilverStone USB 3.0 PCI-e adapter card to see if it would resolve the problem. Installed the drivers (Renesas Electronics 3.0.23, dated 8/21/2012). It did not fix the issue. Symptoms remain the same when plugged into the USB 3.0 ports.
After some hunting for XFX BIOS updates, I updated from P08 BIOS to P09, and then an unofficial P10 BIOS based off the EVGA P10 BIOS (XFX never published a P10 for this board). No change.
Really don’t know what else could be the problem here. I’m hoping someone from SanDisk can offer ideas.