Sandisk Cruzer Blade 8Gb not recognized when creating bootable disk

Yes, both as NTFS and FAT to see if that made a difference. Tried different USB ports as well. There’s really no error message possible. The software interrogates the hardware looking for external drives, flash drives or a writable CD in the CD drive to present as a list of potential targets from which the user can select.
I’ve had a similar issue in the past in which a firmware update program wouldn’t recognise a Blade flash drive. That was a different computer and OS and a different Blade flash drive, too.