Recovering a Flash Drive

Good day,

I have a USB flash drive that suddenly stopped functioning.

Whenever I insert it into the USB port my computer does not see and I can not find a way to access it. Tried it on several computers to no avail.

Anybody have any thoughts on how to recover data from a Flash Drive/Removable USB drive or otherwise access it?

Many thanks,


Gord

 

Have you checked the Device Manager to see if it's seeing anything?

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/c39bd203-f729-47a4-8351-83291e13c8a81033.mspx

I recently was given a Flash Drive that was defective. But after several months it started working again. confused (Free 1gig flash for me! )

 

I'm pretty sure that Windows has to 'see' the drive before you can recover any data from it. Have you tried it on another PC? I had a flash drive that wouldn't work on about half the PC's I tried it on, the other half were fine. If the drive shows up in the device manager, but not in My Computer, you should be able to get the data using this: http://www.majorgeeks.com/TestDisk_&_PhotoRec_d5561.html If that doesn't work, look thru the Data Recovery downloads here at Major Geeks and I'm sure you'll find something of use.

hd2k

 

Sorry I guess I was a little vague.

I have tired 3 different machines and I can not get any of them to "See" the flash drive and I was wondering if there was a way to force it to find or search for the flash drive.



Win XP

 

If the drive will not show up in the device manager, there isn't alot you can do. However, I have used Easy Recovery Pro v6 in the past to recover data from a hard drive that was more or less 'invisible' to the PC, so you might give it a shot. But it isn't free. I'm not sure of the cost, but if it doesn't work for you, it's wasted money. Another option might be to contact a local electronics shop and see if anyone there knows anything about repairing the drive. You might be able to find some info on the web about repairing the drive. It may be a simple solder job, who knows.... GOOD LUCK!!!

hd2k