Weird USB issue?

So my brother came over the other day with his alpine cde-103bt AV unit for his car saying that his usbs stopped working. Whenever he plugs a usb in it says unit error. I tried a large variety of usbs with the same result except for one. Now the odd thing is that I reformatted both of his usbs with fat32 and the same specs as the one usb that worked and still no dice. Decided to check for errors on both of them and found none but then when we plugged them in they both said unit error but when we replugged them in, one of them miraculously started working. Any ideas?