Major Problem with USB Flash Drive

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Blaise170

Blaise170

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Sep 12, 2013
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I'm having a lot of issues with my Sandisk flash drive. It's worked like a charm for several years and I've never had any problems with it until now.

When inserted into any machine, it is unable to be read. Normally for a problem like this I would just format and be done with it. There are two huge problems with that though. The first is that I have over 30GB of important data on it, that I do not have a recent backup of. The second is that the flash drive is completely locked up. When inserted it takes several minutes for Windows to even acknowledge its existence. Then, when opening My Computer to take a look at it, it crashes Explorer.

I've tried my own recovery software on it, but it suffered the same fate as Explorer and crashes as soon as the drive was selected. I would suspect a virus, but I have not done anything out of the ordinary and the flash drive has not left my room for several weeks. Furthermore, I cannot even run a virus scan on it since it will not play nice with Explorer.

I had been using it earlier today to transfer drivers to an old laptop that I just reinstalled Windows XP to (never been connected to the internet). It worked fine up until a few hours ago.

I tried opening Disk Management and it gave a "No media found" message. Anyone have any ideas of where I could turn next?
 
Solution
lp231
Flash drives don't last forever, they have limited read and write cycles until it wears out. It's like writing on a piece of paper, where erasing and writing (repeating the process) will eventually render that piece of paper unusable. This is the same with the nand cell in a USB flash drive.
Try testdisk and see if that works
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lp231

lp231

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Mar 24, 2006
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Flash drives don't last forever, they have limited read and write cycles until it wears out. It's like writing on a piece of paper, where erasing and writing (repeating the process) will eventually render that piece of paper unusable. This is the same with the nand cell in a USB flash drive.
Try testdisk and see if that works
 
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Solution
Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

Judicious
May 9, 2013
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Concur. You have only two solutions, letting a professional (Data Recovery Specialist) do it, but your looking at tens of thousands of dollars to do it (but if your data is worth hundreds of thousands or million dollar contracts, it is worth it) or tossing it in the trash. That is about it.
 
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Blaise170

Blaise170

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Sep 12, 2013
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I was going to try some more software solutions this morning since I needed to go to bed last night. After plugging it in just now, by some miracle it came right up and is working as it should. I'm transferring everything to a backup on my HDD atm in case it stops working again. I may go ahead and get a new flash drive since prices are cheap right now and I've been needing a size upgrade. Thanks for the help though. :)
 
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BillyDataGuy

BillyDataGuy

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Jan 29, 2014
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Flash drive recovery DOES NOT cost tens of thousands of dollars. Not anymore at least. There are companies that have flat rates for around $300 for "chip off recovery" which involves removing the NAND from the PCB and reading it with a compiler. Running recovery software on any drive can overwrite data on it especially using free and cheap do it yourself programs that don't block writing back to your drive. If you ever have problems with USB drives failing or not being read you can learn more about what it takes to recover the data here: How to fix USB drive not Recognized scroll down to the second type of USB recovery.

 
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