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
computer adviser usb flash drive not working article
I’m having problems with my new 2G HP thumb drive. It cannot store pictures and videos. When I copied all the pictures and videos from my Sony Vaio laptop’s hard disk to this thumb drive, it seemed okay. I double-checked if the files were really copied and I even clicked some of the folders containing the pictures. Then after about a week, when I wanted to transfer another batch of multimedia files, lo and behold! All the multimedia files i previously transferred to this thumb drive were gone! I opened the folders and all of them were empty. But the word documents were intact, only the pictures and video files were gone. Is the thumb drive defective?
Do you always remove the drive correctly rather than just pulling it out?
This is a common way to lose files.
Other than that its worth formatting the drive, or even deleting its partition and then formatting in case its format is corrupt.
thanks for your comments
M
Hi there, I have a new Kingston 4 gb flash drive, whenever I try to put a movie in it and try to play it from the drive I always get the message”cannot play the file general error” but the file from where I copied it is not corrupt or whatever. Same as when I tried to put some software installer in it. I have formatted it several times same prob and also I always remove it correctly. thanks.
my flash memory was working before now it is not working giving error( Do you want the configuration now?) so please suggest me what can i do to go through the problem so i can i get my data back as soon as possible thanking you
My problem is the PC will not recognise that I have plugged in the drive. The LED will not come on as well on the drive, but if I move it around in the USB slot then it trys to light up. I have alot of stored files on the drive and would like to remove them, but don’t know how to get into the drive.
Thanks for any help.
I have a PNY 16GB, yeah it has most of my work for school and everything on it, I try to put it in and i’m not getting anything, nothing at all to show that the blasted thing is plugged it, I want to remove files and do my school work and yet I can’t F888ing get into the thing!