I’ve got a 128GB SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 that’s not being seen in File explorer on 2 different laptops that I recently upgraded to W11: Lenovo Flex 5 and Asus ROG Strix G512. The USB drive was working a few months ago on W10 as far as I remember.
The flash drive shows up in Disk Management and in Device Manager.
Things I’ve tried.
adjusting the advanced power plan settings so it doesn’t turn off the USB to save power.
-Going in properties in Device Manager under power management and unchecking “switching the device off to save power”
I’ve tried “Updating drivers” and “uninstalling drivers” but there’s no updates and uninstalling doesn’t do anything.
All my System + OEM stuff is up-to-date.
Is this a major bug? Can anyone offer any solutions to this? azarshagle
Thanks
I forgot to mention I already tried that. It says “The operation failed because because the Disk management console view is not up-to date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task”
However, I refresh and it makes no difference.
I bought a Lenovo laptop recently with Windows 11. My SanDisk USB does not work right now. It worked fine on my old laptop with Windows 10, but not the Lenovo. The major problem I am having is with “properties” and changing it from “general items” to “pictures”. So my question kelsey27 is were you able to resolve your issue?
We too have experienced the Win. 11 not recognizing SanDisk SSD and many other external drives. This is a Win. 11 problem that effects other Mfg. also. Orig. l tracked this to Win. Defender security settings and contacted Win. Tech support. Nobody was aware of this. Every hard drive Mfg. I have spoken with was not aware of this because the default answer is “this is the first time we have heard of this” for liability reasons. BS Just wanted to say this is not exclusive to SanDisk or WD
It’s Win11 not backward compatible with older usb devices. Quick fix: use a chromebook to read the usb thumbdrive and transfer files to a modern device. solved!
Try plugging your SanDisk flash drive into different USB ports (both USB 2.0 and 3.0) and restarting the computer if Windows 11 isn’t recognizing it on several PCs. After that, open Disk Management to check if the drive is showing as unallocated or without a letter. If it is, either create a new volume or assign a drive letter. Additionally, look for driver problems in Device Manager; right-click and update, remove, or reinstall the USB drivers. Turn off the USB selective suspend settings in Power Options, as this can occasionally lead to issues with detection. The drive might be corrupted if none of these fixes resolve the issue. You can safely recover inaccessible files from corrupted or unreadable SanDisk flash drives by using the BLR Data Recovery Tool, a third-party solution.
I used this solution to recover Windows C Drive data. Firstly try the FREE demo edition of this tool before moving to buy the complete edition.
Totally feel your pain here—I had a similar issue after upgrading to Win11 with an older SanDisk drive. If it’s showing up in Disk Management but not File Explorer, there’s a good chance the USB isn’t assigned a drive letter or the file system got messed up.
Here’s a couple things you could try (apologies if you’ve already done some of these):
Check if it has a drive letter in Disk Management. If not, right-click on it > “Change Drive Letter and Paths…” and assign one manually.
Look at the partition info—does it say RAW or Unallocated? If it’s RAW, the file system might’ve been corrupted during the OS upgrade.
Run CHKDSK on the drive if it shows up with a letter. Sometimes a quick chkdsk X: /f in Command Prompt helps.
Try plugging it into a different OS, like a Windows 10 or even Linux machine. That helped me confirm once that the drive wasn’t totally dead.
And just to cover all bases—try disabling Fast Startup under Power Options. That weirdly solved USB detection issues for me before.
It’s also possible that the Windows 11 bug cause the USB drive to not be recognized; try to update Windows to the latest version to fix this problem.
