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Diagnosing Broken Flashdrive

daviden
By daviden
in Troubleshooting
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Go to solution Solved by Ceremony64,

As the others suggested: check disk management first and make sure it does still report a drive size. If not, it is likely unrecoverable.

 

If it does still shows up as storage, you could try common recovery tools such as GetDataBack's recovery tools: https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

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I have a friend's flashdrive that is not working correctly anymore. I want to figure out if recovering what was on the drive is possible. When I plug the drive in Windows recognizes it as a removable drive (D:), but I an unable to actually open the drive to do anything with it. The only way I can get info from it is by going to device manager. File manager doesn't actually display the drive. In drive manager it is correctly formatted (apparently) and states "no media" under the drive name. That doesn't give me a lot of hope, but I figured I could check.

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5 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

i can't think of any ways to attempt repair without possibly wiping any data. if the data is important, i would send it to a data recovery service, not cheap though.

Ya that would be "right" thing to do, but the data on the drive is less than important. It was going to be thrown away, so I figured I might as well try.

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2 minutes ago, daviden said:

Ya that would be "right" thing to do, but the data on the drive is less than important. It was going to be thrown away, so I figured I might as well try.

in that case, you could try seeing if it will clean and format with diskpart in cmd. another thing that has worked for me is flashing the firmware of the drive, if you can find the files for it.

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6 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

in that case, you could try seeing if it will clean and format with diskpart in cmd. another thing that has worked for me is flashing the firmware of the drive, if you can find the files for it.

I see what I can do with those, thanks.

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I don't trust flash drives after they start acting weird like this. They're pretty affordable, so do everything you can to save the data off it then replace it with a new one.

 

See if you can read it with a live Linux environment like Parted Magic.

I sold my soul for ProSupport.

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As the others suggested: check disk management first and make sure it does still report a drive size. If not, it is likely unrecoverable.

 

If it does still shows up as storage, you could try common recovery tools such as GetDataBack's recovery tools: https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

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