Weird USB Flash Drive Issues

Hey everyone!

I've been having some odd issues with my USB ports lately, as well as flash drives. So you know it's on an HP Pavilion g6t, running Windows 7 x64.

It started about a week ago, when I kept getting messages popping up from my Blackberry Device Manager. They would come up every 15-20 seconds or so, saying that the Blackberry Device was mounted to the system, and then there was an error mounting it, then it's been detached. I ignored it, since the Blackberry wasn't even connected to the computer.

Yesterday the issues got weirder. I have a flash drive with a bunch of pictures on it that refuses to work properly on my laptop. I plug it in (tried each port, all same results), it makes the little noise, but theres no Autoplay popup, and it doesn't show up in My Computer. It DOES show up in Devices and Printers, but when I right click to Browse it, the option to browse the drive is greyed out.

I tried testing some other flash drives (sandisk cruzers), and they show up just fine whether theyre empty or full. Works fine on all ports. The weird thing is that they don't have their regular icon though, it's the "unknown" icon instead. http://attachments.techguy.org/attachments/152851d1246640371/icon.jpg

My wife tried the USB drive with the pictures and they worked fine on her computer. I tried it on mine again after deleting and reinstalling all of my USB drivers, reassigning drive letter, going into the registry and deleting upper/lower values (saw it on a writeup), and every other thing I found via google searches and this site. Still nothing.

She tried popping the USB drive in her computer again to just copy the pictures onto one of the USB drives that work on my laptop, and now she's having the exact same issues with it. Tried all the same stuff on her laptop too, to no avail.

I have no idea what to try next. I've gone through multiple scans, restore points, driver updates/reinstalls, and about 2 pages worth of google results. I'm really hoping someone can help us considering these are our wedding photos.

 

Update: tried doing the "delete infcache.1 and use a working USB drive to reinstall it" method a few times as well, no avail.

 

A heads up, my post wont fix your issue, but suggest some steps you can take to back up your data.

The 1st thing that we need to confirm is that, is the usb drive failing. Of course, with the other issues that you have provided it seems like its an OS issue. But a failing usb drive can produce the similar symptoms that you have described.

I would recommend popping over to a friend place to try out the usb drive, and back it up on 1st sight of the drive. Then do an anti-virus scan on the drive, in practice this should be done 1st, but since its important data, its best to back up first, then scan. As if the scan picks up an spyware, there is a chance you may lose the drive again on your friends machine.

A far fetch idea, open RUN from Start menu, then launch [diskmgmt.msc] , without the square brackets. And see if your usb drive appears in there with a drive letter. If so, try navigating to the drive letter manually via Windows Explorer Address bar or via a web browser ex IE/FF or Chrome. Example, instead of going to http://www... jst pop in K:\ in the address url, where K is the drive letter for the usb drive that you may see diskmgmt.

Alternatively, if you have familiar with ISOs, you can try getting Ubuntu or Puppy live linux disc and try to see if your usb drive can be detected in the linux environment.

Of course, once the data is backed up, you can try looking into the registry apps or other fixes to resolve the usb issue. But if you are having other odd issues, like with the black berry symptoms, then you may save more time by re installing the entire OS.

All the best!

 

I tried the explorer route, typing in G:\, all it says is "Please insert a disk into removable disk G". Disk Management shows the G Drive at the bottom, listed as Disk 1, and No Media. Devices and Printers still show the flash drive as at least being acknowledged as plugged in, but it won't allow me to browse it.

I'll have to head over to a friend's house and see if we can pull up something there, and maybe save it to a new USB. I'll keep the thread updated, thanks!

 

Welp. We tried popping the flash drive into 3 other computers, which all did the same thing. "Removable Drive H" popped up in My Computer, and when it was clicked, it just said "Insert disk into removable disk H". Wasn't able to get any further with it, tried all the same stuff, reinstalling drivers, reassigning letters, etc.

Unless there's some secret solution we haven't found yet, I'm gonna give up on this thing. :\

 

No idea unfortunately. There's no labeling or serial number. The driver only identifies it as "Generic USB Drive".

 

Not sure if its time for data recovery, but if you are willing. You can install recuva (http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/recuva_portable.html), format your usb drive and run recuva against the usb drive.

If its due to usb header corruption or other minor corruption, then its a good chance you can recover back those files right after a format. But if its a hardware corruption, then the amount of photos you can recover could be limited. But only go down this track if you dont have any other options left ><