USB2 pen drives don't work on USB 3 ports

this is a real strange one, for some reason none of my older USB 2 pen drives will work on the USB3 ports on my computer, I can use my USB3 hard drives and also USB3 pen drives, but not USB2.

My brother phoned me a week back saying that his old card reader will not work on his computer, that has USB3 ports, I built the computer a few weeks back for him, so I thought may be a cable have come out, but the ports worked fine using a USB 3 hard drive before I left.
so is this a silly Windows bug again?


fine in linux and I can stick a USB 2 pen drive in the USB3 and boot up from it, so I presume this is a window bug.

Anyone else noticed this?

Have a look through the BIOS settings for your motherboard. I seem to recall some motherboards having specific settings where you can specify that USB ports use a certain standard such as 3 only, or can be set to be backwards compatible with 2, 1 etc.

I thought maybe it was something to do with the bios, I even reset it, the strange thing is, everything works fine on the ports at the back of the machine.
so this morning, I took the side of the machine off, just to see if there is anything wrong with the USB3 cable, they are awful things the internal USB 3 sockets, but all seems ok, I swapped it from the mother board to the connection on my USB 3 card, but still did the same thing, I even tried some different USB 3 ports I got for my brothers machine, before I got him a different case. Still, no go, still at least now I have four USB3 sockets on the front of machine instead of 2.

Like it is not a big problem, I still have USB 2 on the front as well, but even my mouse dongle would not work on the front USB 3 ports.
It is strange that both me and my brother seems to be having the same problem, but saying that My brother have only used it with a SD card reader and that could be a strange Chinese thing.

I thought it did work with Linux, but I tried it again and it still has the same problem with linux. i know MS can change certain things in the UEFI via Windows 10, so I don't know if that have happened, but it seems to be since i installed windows 10 2004.
Oh yes, I can't even boot the machine using a USB2 device in the front USB3 ports. eiother, the bios will not even see the device.

All very strange, as I said not a problem as still have the front USB 2 ports, but I am slowly changing all my USB2 stick to USB 3 anyway as they were only cheap plastic Lexar ones and the plastic is starting to fail on some of them.

Any updates on this as I was thinking of moving up to 2004 soon, so am interested to know if all my recovery sticks for my PC and Laptop are going to be no good and I need to purchase some USB3 ones?

I have three external disks, all USB3 but I don't really want to use them as recovery drives as they just contain pure data from backups and normally live in my safe!

Do I need to ditch my USB2 sticks now and move to USB3 ones?

Anybody?

I wonder is this is a Ryzen-specific problem? I've just bought a new PC, with a Ryzen processor, and find that an external Blu-Ray drive is very flaky on USB 3 but fine on USB 2. I'm not aware of this problem with the old i7-equiped PC.

What processor is in your brother's PC?

Interesting, I have a new(ish) Intel Core i7-8700 running at 4.29GHz and have not experienced any problems at all.

I was about to change up to Win10pro V2004 when I noticed this thread!

Since ALL my recovery USBs are v2 and not v3 it naturally made me stop in my tracks.

All my data is kept on USB3 External Disks thank goodness,
but NOT my actual, "let's just forget this drive, wipe it and install Windows again USB sticks" !