USB Flash Drive Not Working ?

USB flash drive not working ? What can you do ? Generally a USB flash drive, memory stick or whatever you call the drive is a very robust way of storing data, they can normally sustain a great deal of abuse and still work, I’ve even had one go through a washing machine cycle after I left it in a shirt pocket, and it still worked after.

Most of the time a problem with a USB drive not working can be attributed to several things.

It’s ended its life expectancy, very rare as generally you can expect a drive to last around ten years, but as there are not too many of this age around its hard to be accurate here, if your USB flash drive is not working as its ended its life expectancy you’ll need to buy another, there is no way around this.

If anyone has a solution to this please let me know and I’ll add it to the page.

Files on the USB flash drive are not working or corrupt, the files are copied, but when you try to access them you get file read errors, this happens when the files are not fully copied, usually caused by improperly removing the USB flash drive.

Files that are corrupt and do not open properly will normally be a different size to it’s working equivalent.

Always make sure it’s removed correctly by clicking on the USB icon on the bottom right of your screen and choosing to remove, you’ll get a system message when it’s ok to remove.

When you plug-in your USB flash drive and it all appears to be working ok, but you can’t find it, this is a common issue with computers that have many drive letters in use, and the USB drive tries to use the same drive letter which is already assigned to another device and it can be seen.

To remedy this right click on MY Computer select Manage, choose Disk Management, now you can see your USB flash drive, right click and select, Change Drive Letter and Paths, now change the drive letter for one that’s not in use, Z is usually a safe choice.

NOTES..
Always make sure you remove the USB flash drive properly as above, never simply just remove it. This is the most common cause of a USB flash drive not working,

USB flash drives can be formatted & partitioned like a normal disk, but when choosing a disk format, unless you have a reason, play it safe and use FAT32, otherwise NTFS can give compatibility issues on other formats and older systems, as well as security issues.

If you find your USB drive to simply be slow checkout the USB on your pc, you might be using USB type 1, which is around 7 times slower than USB 2

Your USB flash drive will work for many years if looked after

Be sure to checkout more of our articles

We hope you found our USB flash drive not working article of use, if you’d like more info on these great little drives checkout our other page here..

computer adviser usb flash drive not working article