windows 11 not showing drive

windows 11 not showing usb flash drive. i have tried using windows disk management to erase all partitions and created new using defaults but still not showing. i have also done the same in windows 10 and it appears as normal, no changes to filesystem with NTFS or exfat defaults in windows 10 everything works as normal but the same thing in windows 11 nothing shows as normal

 

the drive is 128gb and not bootable when initialising as new in disk managment but when installing ventoy it is bootable. the drive appears as bootable in windows 11 boot menu and boots as normal i havent tried in windows 10 but i assume it would work

 

In addition to stapp's post and what is in the How-To Geek article --
In the past, I have solved similar USB flash drive issues using NirSoft USBDeview.
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html

"USBDeview is a small utility that lists all USB devices that currently connected to your computer, as well as all USB devices that you previously used."
"USBDeview also allows you to uninstall USB devices that you previously used, disconnect USB devices that are currently connected to your computer, as well as to disable and enable USB devices."

Using USBDeview to look for the USB flash drive and remove it from the list of previously used USB devices helped, in my case. But that was before 2020, on Windows 7. I don't know if it can resolve similar issues with USB devices on Windows 11.

 

@garry35,
Did stapp's post, and what's in the How-To Geek article, or perhaps NirSoft USBDeview as I suggested, help you to get your USB flash drive showing on your Windows 11 system?

 

embarassingly it turned out the drive wasnt assigned a drive lette lol. the simplest solution can always trip you, so check the simple things first

 

Don't sweat it. I been monkeying with these Bill Gates Windows since 98. I continue to stumble over that same issue from time to time before eventually finding that this unfinished project called Windows, still fails at times to auto-assign a mount point letter. For me it usually involves plug in USBs too, exclusively.

 

Hard to believe they haven't ever fixed this. It is almost always because the drive was previously assigned a drive letter that another drive has hijacked.