I have a couple of large capacity flash drives that I store and transport music on (to and from work mostly) and one of them is no failing to open up when I plug it in to the USB. Is this thing done forever now? Is there any hope of it ever working again? I can hear the mechanism trying to open, or work (or whatever the terminology is) and my computer shows that it is plugged in but no external drive shows up under My Computer. Thanks ahead of time for any thoughts.
By the way, I know that there really is no mechanism inside because there are no moving parts but I hear something. I dunno, maybe I am losing my mind. Whatever the case, it ain't working.
OK...how about giving us some info on which USB flash drive you are using? How long have you owned it? Are you having problems opening a particular file or the whole USB is jut not responding? Have you tried to restart your computer and put USB again?
I've had a similar experience with a USB Drive. In this case, someone had their key chain attached to it, so it wasn't making the correct contact. Also, you may want to take a look at the connection. Those USB drives tend to "wear n tear" on the tip where you plug it in. Make sure that it is tight and goes in correctly. Thirdly, i would try it out on a differ computer. Maybe the USB port is damaged somehow. Or...sometimes if you do not "Safety stop the drive" via right click the icon in the taskbar to stop it, rather then just pulling it out can damage the drive as well. Good luck...post your results. Hope you get it working.
I've only had it for about 7 months. It's an 8 gig iomagic. It's the whole that won't open up, and I have tried on 2 different computers and tried restarting both. I think I have resigned myself to the fact that it may never work again. Luckily everything that was on it can be gotten again. I'm just disappointed about losing the drive.
Sorry bud... Did you unplug the drive while it was reading/writing data? Always unplug the drive after you "Safety remove the drive". Just to be safe.
What happens if you can't eject the drive? Windows keeps saying it cannot be ejecting, but the drive is not being used (!) Can forcingthe eject (unplugging w/o proper shutdown) be okay? It is one particular ext hd of mine that 4 out of 5 times will not shut down properly.
The only problem in this case is if there is a file that is currently being accessed, or one that was changed recently but the changes are all still in the cache and not represented by actual changes on the flash drive itself. You might lose data, corrupt the file, or possibly (but not likely) corrupt the file system, but it shouldn't really be a problem unless you remove it when actual writing was going on. It shouldn't cause the flash drive to fail. But I usually wait until I shut down or log off the machine anyway just in case. Sometimes they just stop working on their own. Don't put your eggs in a single basket with these things.
Is there anyway to possibly format the drive? Maybe Windows Drive Management will recognize it to format? Right click My Computer->Manage->Disk Management
BTW. How much did it cost you? I know I have seen pretty expensive USB drives, but due to their "frailty", I tend to buy the 2gb cheapy.
Cost me nuthin'. Got it from work. I always had extra space on their for personal things to transport to and from work.
could be that the usb connector is seperating from the circuit board. I've had to resolder a couple in the past
USB devices do sometimes fail. Maybe it's to do with how small they are and the fact that they can transmit power at a, (relatively), high voltage, (something like 5v IIRC), right next to data at very low voltage. I've seen a number of them go pear-shaped over the years. Probably 5/6 out of some 200 printers with USB ports went bad whereas the old-fashioned ones with standard parallel ports, (LPT's), I think I had, maybe, 2 out of some 600+. I mean, the printers themselves went bad... just not the ports on them. You should be able to take a USB device out without shutting down without necessarily damaging the device itself. However, you will almost certainly corrupt a file or, possibly, the filesystem if it's in the middle of an I/O transfer for obvious reasons. Whether that means it can't be recognised by the operating system from then on I don't know but, tbh, I doubt it.