[SOLVED] USB Flash Drive Error: "Please insert disk into E:"

[Exploded117]

I currently have a Patriot 8GB USB flash drive that has worked fine for the past few months. The amazon listing can be found here (https://www.amazon.com/Patriot-8GB-Pulse-Flash-Drive/dp/B00842689I/ref=sr_1_10?s=pc&srs=2530102011&ie=UTF8&qid=1471111348&sr=1-10&keywords=Patriot+8GB).

 

However, today when I went to use the drive into my PC, I came across an error with the drive. When I go to open the drive in Windows Explorer, I get an error that says "Please insert a disk into E:". I cannot access any of the files of the drive, and multiple repair methods have not worked. Also, when going to format the drive, I get a message that says "Windows was unable to complete the format."

 

Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers

[flibberdipper]

Usually when I have this issue I restart my PC, plug the flash drive into my laptop, and then plug it back into my PC and it works fine.

[DarkEnergy]

My Toshiba flash drive behaved like this. It was dead even after I tried low level formatting and 5 different software programs. 

Look into Disk Management and see if you can format it there. If not, try formatting it on something running a Linux distro, I've found that tends to work if Windows can't get it running. Something like Ubuntu would tell you if it has bad sectors on it or not. 

[TechJ]

If you do not need any data try this.

CMD > Diskpart > list disk > select disk (Your number) > clean > select disk (same again) > create partition primary

Windows should then ask you to format it

Hopefully this helps

[Exploded117]

20 minutes ago, tmcclelland455 said:

Usually when I have this issue I restart my PC, plug the flash drive into my laptop, and then plug it back into my PC and it works fine.

Plugged the USB stick into my laptop and received the same error. However, after my PC had restarted, I was no longer receiving the "Please insert disk" error, but I could still not use the drive and windows still could not format it.

 

15 minutes ago, TechJ said:

If you do not need any data try this.

CMD > Diskpart > list disk > select disk (Your number) > clean > select disk (same again) > create partition primary

Windows should then ask you to format it

Hopefully this helps

All of the data on this USB drive was backed up to other places (due to a previous data loss experience), so I tried this and it worked. Thanks a bunch!

 

18 minutes ago, DarkEnergy said:

My Toshiba flash drive behaved like this. It was dead even after I tried low level formatting and 5 different software programs. 

Look into Disk Management and see if you can format it there. If not, try formatting it on something running a Linux distro, I've found that tends to work if Windows can't get it running. Something like Ubuntu would tell you if it has bad sectors on it or not. 

Thanks for the suggestion, would have used this as an excuse to finally dual boot Windows and Linux on my PC, but the above method worked. I still need to get around to doing that one day.....