SOLVED USB thumb drive freezes computer.

[windows user]

I have 32GB Toshiba transmemory thumb drive and I recently tried installing windows 10 to go on it and I did but it was slow and it failed on the first boot I had the raspberry pi os on it before that and you may ask why I would do that and that is because the computer I am typing from is using a different Windows to go flash drive running windows 11 dell precision m4400. But when windows 10 failed naturally I reinstalled it using Rufus as I did before. But I canceled it in the middle of applying the image because it was slow then I plugged it back into the prescision and used my back up drive as a windows 10 installer (Rufus again) but i booted and the installer did not detect the thumb drive and i tried searching the for the thumb drive again using the installer and it sat there for hours frozen util I unplugged it and it snapped right back as if nothing happend so i plugged it into my main desktop and it froze rufus would not open and If it did it would not respond niether would file explorer and if you closed file explorer then fileexplore.exe would crash and would not load unless I unplugged the flash drive So i tried raspberry pi imager and that opened and with some encouragement detected the thumb drive but it would fail to format as fat32 so I tried partition managers and they did something to the point where it was just a RAW file partition but everything failed miserably and I have not given up but it Would be appreciated if someone could give some pointers.

 

[windows user]

I really need to get this taken care of now because it is hurting my productivity. I have checked the hardware everything appears to be fine but I have not checked it with a meter. it does not smell burnt up or look burnt up but it gets extremely hot. Someone post PLEASE I need this so i can work with windows 7.

 

[ubuysa]

It rather sounds as though tthat USB thumb drive is now faulty. To install Windows you only need an 8GB USB drive, I'd go out any buy one.

 

[Bighorn]

Not having punctuation in the first post makes for difficult reading. I'd agree with @ubuysa but for my needs I have a Linux Mint computer running with a USB SATA Drive Dock for testing drives and USB 3 ports for working with Thumb drives. It has GPARTED installed which allows for manipulating partitions and formatting or deleting as desired. It also can use a number of formats that Windows can't plus format partitions larger than the FAT32 limit of 32GB which is what most new Thumb drives and SDHC memory cards come as, have done an HDD of 500GB as FAT32 which Windows can work with.

 

[windows user]

I tried gparted, it froze while loading disks.

 

[Bighorn]

Can you replicate the problem with other drives in the same manner? If not it likely a bad drive, if so it's likely bad ports on the motherboard. Does the motherboard have PCIe X1 slots for add-in cards? Maybe such a card will alleviate the need for more expensive fixes, I have them in a couple Desktops to gain or gain more USB 3 ports, very cost-effective.

 

[windows user]

Gave up as I would agree with you on it as being a faulty thumb drive. Checked the circuits all looks OK. One of the resistors probably burnt up and that's all there is to it, so I bought a new and finally got an Hd. In answer to this last post Bighorn made this pc is too old, putting in an addition would not work because even if i put in USB 3.0, the PCie speed would most likely bottleneck (though I have no evidence that it would), and on top of all that it's a small form factor, with two slots.