Thinkpads Forum

I have two E570 laptops, one Windows 10 Pro and one Windows 10 Home. Recently both stopped letting me plug in USB flash drives more than once after booting up. I have updated every driver possible and I seem to be left with updating the BIOS or changing settings in the BIOS. I am not qualified to do the latter without detailed instructions. I have not tried USB 3.0 flash drives and I am going to do that. Has anyone else seen this problem. Surely other E570 laptops have the same problem. More important is there a fix? Thanks.

Ok,I'll reply to my own question. Nothing has worked to allow me to unplug and replug my USB flash drive and have my Windows 10 E570 recognize it. It recognizes it after I reboot but unplugging it and replugging it results in no recognition. I discovered that if I plugged in one flash drive after a reboot and left it plugged in I could plug in a second one and it would work. I could then unplug and replug either drive and it would be recognized. The key was to have one recognized USB flash drive at all times. BTW I bought a 3.0 USB flash drive and it has the same issues as my others which are probably 2.0. The only thing not tried is a BIOS setting change or update. I am not skilled in settings changes in the BIOS and an update is something I might do. In the meantime I may just keep one USB flash drive plugged in at all times.

Are you using quality USB sticks or just any El-Cheapo?
Have you checked the USB Power Management settings in Device Manager?
Make sure they are all UNticked.

The USB flash drives are not inexpensive and all four of mine have the same problem. I bought a new 3.1 flash drive to check and it is the same.
I don't see power setting in the Device Manager.

RealBlackStuff, I disabled selective suspend for USB in the control panel and it did not change the problem. I looked in the registry for the entry to change it but did not find it probably because I am not adept navigating the registry. I will look at updating the BIOS and a next step. Thanks for the help. It was worth a try.

Surprisingly, it seems I'm experiencing this issue as well, running Windows 10 Pro (build 2004 AKA 2020-04) on a Thinkpad X220. I don't really use Windows often on this machine (I primarily run Linux), and it seems to be a software issue, as I don't experience this problem on Linux at all.

Sadly, I don't have a solution yet-- don't have time to troubleshoot it at the moment.

Even more surprising, the issue went away somehow. I updated Windows to 21H2 a few days after my previous post, but that didn't solve the issue. But a little over two weeks later, USB flash drives started getting recognized normally.