@jrmorgan19 – Paul (hardsuit) did a bit of research for me. According to the Viking forums, it was probably because your thumb drive was “too big”. The Designer SE is a bit older, and it just doesn’t see the thumb drives with a lot of capacity. He got some 16’s, and the machine recognizes them, even without any formatting. It might recognize as big as a 32, but we checked it with a 16.
My Viking has a lot of trouble recognizing thumb drives too, even if they are small.
Best bet is to use a computer to copy your embroidery design onto the thumb drive that came with our Viking machine. IIRC, it has something gaudy and conspicuous attached to it, like a big pink flower I think. At least it did at one time …
Paul has stashed that one safely. He got 2 new ones, and he said the Viking would recognize them, even unformatted. It wasn’t even acknowledging the presence of the one JR was trying to use.
I mean – it’s all Greek to me. So long as it works… 
I’m glad Paul was able to get new ones to read. The original one is so dear to the machine that’s why I put the big flower on it!
I have a much newer Viking at home and I can’t get it to read any other drives, even real small ones. @Hardsuit … looking for tips on what kind of thumb drive you got for this.
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Hey y’all! Thank you all so much. I tried using a computer to transfer the files but I guess I wasn’t doing that correctly. Afterwards I switched to the 256gb thumb drive so that might explain why that one wasn’t working. The internet also suggested that I use a smaller one, so I will definitely check this out! I will also keep a lookout for one with a big flower on it.
I’ll check it out again real soon and report how it went!
Thanks again y’all.
I had a similar issue, but it was because I didn’t follow the steps in the order of the manual as @dryad2b taught. I put my thumb drive in after I turned on the machine.
Older tech doesn’t always recognize accessories if it has already booted up.
I planned to test this when I come in today.
Tldr: RTFM and follow that order of operations exactly.
Where exactly is the Viking thumb drive? I haven’t set it aside yet, still need to do that.
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It’s in the accessory box for the sewing machine itself, where the screwdriver and bobbins are.
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Thank yall for reporting that. I tried to look for one as I thought there would be, but I did not look too hard at the time. I will be there this evening, I will look for one then. I will also bring my own 16gb as a backup.
There are 2 (2!) lovely little red thumb drives that the Viking has already deigned to acknowledge.
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There are some different things to be aware of with thumb drives when having trouble…
1 is the size of the partitions. Perhaps the OS in the device doesn’t recognize the partitions because of that.
2 is the format of the thumb drive. In Windows there’s FAT32 and on the newer, larger ones, exFAT, and on some others NTFS. This isn’t counting odd formats you can do on other OSes. If one format isn’t recognized, try another.
Could it be that you need to put the thumb drive in the machine first before it has ever been put into a computer? I know my Janomes wont recognize a USB of any size if it has ever been formatted by a computer prior to going into the emb machine first.
It’s possible that we jumped straight ahead to this. Paul bought the drives, and tried them in the Viking the very first thing.
So – note to folks that want their own – buy the 16’s, and bring them here to try in the Viking before you try to load them elsewhere.