USB Crash

W

Wino

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My 16 GB Transcend USB flash drive all of a sudden doesnt get recognised by Windows. Windows briefly finds it, shows it as E, then it disappears. Is there something I can do here?
What is an acceptable life span of a USB drive?

Refreshing the window briefly picks up the USB, then it disappears again.

TIA
 
Last edited:
Thanks
Have already tried on another PC as well as my car (where the USB was working perfectly till yesterday.)
 
Well flash drives aren't like ssd's that detect and relocate bad sectors. So yes they do go bad. You can try reformatting it. Btw do you safely eject it when you remove it? Perhaps the file system is corrupt, try a scandisk.
 
I cant see it all to format it. Must say I seldom do a safe eject.
 
Wino said:
I cant see it all to format it. Must say I seldom do a safe eject.
Click to expand...

That's a guaranteed way to corrupt it (over time).

I always do. And in the odd case that it won't I'd rather do a shutdown than just pull it.

On XP go Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Do you see it there?
 
Go into your disk manager (right click My Computer go to Manage go to Storage and click on Disk Management) while the USB is plugged in. Do you see anything there?

If you can, reformat it there (select/right click and do your business by removing the partition etc etc etc)

If you can't see it at all, wave goodbye to the R50 you spent on it, now go out and buy a bigger one and don't forget to safe-eject ;)
 
So thats that. I cant even see it in Disk Manager. Its a gonner. I didnt realize safe-eject was so NB. Do you have any links WRT safe-eject. I'd like to read up about it.
 
Wino said:
So thats that. I cant even see it in Disk Manager. Its a gonner. I didnt realize safe-eject was so NB. Do you have any links WRT safe-eject. I'd like to read up about it.
Click to expand...

Safe eject will stop the file system from corrupting. This is not what happened here I think. It's just a hardware failure. It happens.
 
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