Malfunction usb pen drive not recognized

Hi there,

The fact that this one flash drive doesn't work in several computers, while others work fine, means it has become corrupted.

Go to disk management, and in the lower graphical section, see if it is recognized as a removable device.
If so, right click on the VolumeStatus area where it may say Unallocated, or possibly nothing, and choose Format.
That will install either a FAT-32 or NTFS file structure.

Formatting a drive of any kind will cause loss of all the data on the device, so if there is valuable data on the flashdrive, a Data Recovery application should be tried first.

Many times flashdrives or even removable drives become corrupted if they are disconnected abruptly before cached data is completely written to the drive and the files are closed.

Hi John,

You sound more knowledgeable about drive file structures than me. I wandered if you would be so kind as to look at my thread "[Solved] How to format an unformatted flash drive" in Flash Media and give me your consided opinion.

Many thanks

Charlie Cosmic

Hi Charlie,

I don't see your post in Hard Drives. Please post your problem with the flash drive again in hard drives general, and I will be happy to take a look at it. Give us as much info as you have, what you've done, what didn't work, and we'll hopefully steer you in the right direction

Hey John,

I faced similar problem and my disk 1 under the Disk Management shows:

Disk 1
Removable (Z 

No Media

I can safely remove this flash drive but my computer cannot detect this and format is not an option. I can only change the letter path, did an software update but still could not solve it.

Hope you help.  

Or anyone please.  

Hi Melvin, and welcome to Tom's Hardware,

Please be as specific as you can about your hardware setup including what Drive 0 is, how it is partitioned, & what OS you are using.

I am assumming Drive 1 is the Flash drive, but it should be recognized as the next available drive letter, like E or F, unless you assigned Drive letter Z to it. What is the size of the Flash drive, and does it have the file structure as FAT-32 or NTFS on it? Also does it have important data on it that is not replacable?

Many times the removable Flash drives become corrupted, for example when removing them before all cached data is saved, and the easiest solution is to just replace the Flash drive for $15-$25.

Might take a screen shot of your Computer Management screen, with the Flash drive plugged in, to be able to see both Drive 0, the Flash drive, and other installed hadware. That is always worth a thousand words. Can be done using ImageShack or Photobucket to upload the screen shot, and then post the URL in your response so we can see it.