You can fix an Undetectable USB Flash Drive:

Recover Files after USB Drive Corrupt or Unresponsive

Oliver Powell Updated on December 7, 2016 Data Recovery Software 67 Comments

USB Flash Drive Structure

A USB flash drives stores all its data in the memory similar to a hard drive. The operating system can, later on, fetch this data when required to be accessed.

Whenever your USB drive becomes corrupt or unresponsive try our USB Windows data recovery software.

There can be various issues that may turn your USB drive data inaccessible. Such as if the drive is unmounted improperly from the port then it can lead to data corruption. Another reason for the stores data corruption can be invalid data in the Master Boot Record (MBR) or Partition Boot Record (PBR) or directory structure on the USB drive.

There can be various other reasons that may turn your USB not working. This may happen either due to physical corruption or logical corruption. The common hardware/physical issues are broken stems and connectors, dead drives (no power supply), broken circuit or NAND gate, not recognized, RAW, need to format, not accessible, and Dead Drives, etc.

Recover Data using Professional Recovery Tool

Simple to most complex USB data loss issues can be handled with USB Recovery Software. You can free download such program and install it on your PC to begin scanning the device and recover data. Try Stellar Partition Recovery software that supports scanning of large capacity USB drives and traces inaccessible or formatted files with their attributes and size intact.

Steps to recover data from corrupt or inaccessible USB drive:

• Download and install Stellar Phoenix Windows data recovery – professional.
• Connect the problem USB drive you’re trying to recover data.
• Under ‘Drive Recovery‘, your problem USB device will be listed with the predefined label on it D:\ or E:\.

• Click on the drive and select ‘Advanced Recovery‘ (keep the radio button selected to FAT32) and let software begin scanning the drive.
• The software scans the media and lists all the recoverable files as well as lets you see the preview of files ready to recover.
• Choose any or all the desired files and folders and click on ‘Recover’ button.

Dealing with inaccessible/corrupt USB drive?

To recover data from an inaccessible USB or Flash drive, first you must be able to identify the exact reason leading to the problem while reading the USB drive.

Recovering from Physical Issues:

If you have a physical error such as a broken connector, circuit board, NAND memory chip of the drive, then the hardware needs to be replaced to repaired. Doing-it-yourself can lead to even worse situations. Better you get help from the experts in this area. You can hire any of the companies that are specialized in recovering the USB drive from physical corruption. They will easily get your hardware repaired using the special hardware and tools they have.

Broken Stems and Connectors, & Dead Drives (no power to the USB):

A common indication of the physical errors is some kinds of error messages or troubles that you after connecting the USB. Common error messages are “Please Insert Disk into Removable Disk” or “USB Device Not Recognized or Malfunctioned“, “you need to format the disk before using it”, RAW partition, dead or unresponsive drives, and damaged controller chips and/or circuit boards.

If the silver USB connector is broken or the circuit board is damaged it leads to power supply cut-off to the USB.  In such case, soldering and circuit repair are required. It’s not advised to do it yourself as if anything goes wrong, you may permanently lose access to your USB. It’ll reduce the chances of getting your data successfully recovered or sometimes impossible. To deal with above physical errors, specialized equipment and expertise are required. So better you hand over it to some professional and let him deal with the chaos.

The error: “Please Insert Disk into Removable Disk”:

This error occurs when the flash drive controller software becomes corrupt. It can also happen if there are some issues with the NAND memory. The above error can be caused by low grade or generic NAND memory chips. With a frequent number of reads and writes, the state of the drive turns worse.

The error indicates that there is some issue with the NAND memory chips. Most probably the metadata stored inside the NAND memory is corrupted or wiped and it can’t be mounted then, thus turning the drive unreadable. Whenever you try to read the drive, you will get the error message “Please insert a disk into Removable Disk”. Also, if you try to check the drive size, it usually shows its capacity as 0MB. As the device cannot be mounted on windows so, if you check Device manager under Disk drives, a different name for the USB drive will be listed. Also, the Disk Management shows a drive letter with No Media.

In such case, you need to search for manufacturers that perform USB data recovery or flash drive data recovery.

Recovering files from logical issues:

If there are some logical/software errors with the USB drive, you can easily fix it. You need to repair the file structure so that the USB flash drive can be used again.

This is how you can scan the problems using Windows:

• Insert the USB drive into the USB port of your system
• Go to My Computer>Removable Disk Icon.
• Right click the Removable Disk Icon  and open its Properties
• Click on the Tools tab.
• Click Check Now button.
• You will be given two check disk options “Automatically fix file system errors” and “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”.
• Check both check boxes.
• Click Start. This will initiate the scanning process.
• Click Close after the scan process is completed.

If you are using windows 7 then carry out the following steps to repair the USB Flash Drive:

• Insert the USB drive into the USB port of your system
• Go to My Computer>Removable Disk Icon.
• Right click the Removable Disk Icon  and open its Properties
• Click on the Tools tab.
• Click  “Rebuild” button
• Let the scan process get completed. Close the scan window once it’s completed.
• Right-click the icon of the USB flash drive and “Eject”. Then remove the drive from the USB port.

Hopefully, this would help you solve your problem.

If you require reformatting your disk, try out the following steps:

• While formatting the disk choose NTFS file system and then format.
• After this, format again with FAT32. For more information about formatting USB flash drives, read more

To fix an Undetectable USB Flash Drive:

Test the USB port: You may not be able to use your USB drive because of some problems with the USB port, not with the USB drive. So, before performing any repair of the USB drive also make sure that the USB port is working fine.

Steps to test the USB port: Remove the USB drive, reboot your computer, and test the USB drive again. See if it works. It is possible that one port may not be working but all others are working fine. So try each port of your computer. If this doesn’t help, try the USB drive on some other computer.

Sometimes, the Installed copy of Windows OS may not be able to recognize your USB drive due to some USB version limitations.

You can fix an Undetectable USB Flash Drive:

Drive Recognition:

• Go to Start> Control Panel> Device Manager
• Expand the list next to “Disk Drives” option.
• You can see a down facing arrow over your USB drive. Double click it and choose the option to “Enable Device”.
• Click Next.
• Click ‘Next’ again.
• Finally, click Finish.

After this, you need to assign the drive letter. To do so follow given steps:

• Go to Start>Control Panel>System and Security>Administrative Tools then choose “Computer Management.”
• Right, click the USB drive. Select the option to “Change Drive Letter and Paths.”
• Click ADD and then click OK.
• Now, assign any available drive letter to the USB drive by clicking it.
• Right, click the USB to designate it as “Online.”

If this fails, use the Windows automated “Fix it For Me” service can resolve the issue. If this also doesn’t help, then modifying the system registry will help you tackle the issue. I wouldn’t suggest you to go for this option as it may harm your OS.

If none of the remedies proves helpful for you, then the last option for you is to try Flash Drive data recovery tools, USB or any other external storage media as mentioned at the beginning of this article. You can try Stellar tools for free and see if your inaccessible documents are still there and can be recovered.