Repairing detectable but corrupt or non-working pen/thumb/flash drives

We all are used to relying on the pen/thumb drives of today that are descendants of their great grandfather, the floppy. Although much more reliable than floppies, pen drives are still prone to failure. This post is on repairing these drives and making them usable again.

Have you suddenly encountered with the problem that when you plug in your USB drive, the removable media shows up but when you try to open it, it returns with the message “Please insert a disk in to drive H:”.

If yes then follow the following steps. By applying this simple method you’ll have 80 % chance to get back your USB drive hardware. This works only in the above error condition. If the windows doesn’t detect your USB drive, then there is probably flaw in the USB media.

Please keep in mind that, you’ll have to lose your data when following this tutorial.

1. Plug in your USB drive.

2. Go to Start>My Computer, right click on the 'My Computer' icon and click on 'Manage' menu.

3. 'OK' any confirmation dialog box needed. The Computer Management window will pop up. Click on 'Disk management' under 'Storage tree' menu.

4. Now at the right side of the window right click on your removable media. (unlike the image below, it will show unknown information) , right click on your removable media and choose 'Change Drive Letter and paths'.

                                                                        Click to enlarge

5. Now in new window choose any drive later that is not taken by any media (M:, N: , :K: etc).

6. Click on the 'ok' button and close the management window. Try opening your pen-drive.

7. There is a chance that your pen-drive has recovered if this method worked.

If the problem still prevails, follow the above steps but instead of choosing 'Change drive letter and paths', choose 'Format' and give a quick format to it. Now you’ll have finally lost your data but the pen-drive is safe in your hands. Use this step only if the changing of the drive letter and paths doesn't work, because this step would probably mean that your data will be lost.

Hope this worked. We can have yet another post on recovering data out of faulty flash drives and cards later.