I have a USB flash drive (16GB Kingston DataTraveller 100 G3) that stopped working a few months ago. As far as I can remember, all I did was pull it out of the USB port without "safely removing" it. Since then, Windows 7 has refused to recognise it at all – it's not visible in Explorer, Disk Management or diskpart.
A few moments ago, it was recognised by way of a "Device has mulfunctioned" popup in the tray, after which it displayed in Device Manager as an Unknown Device. Right-clicking and uninstalling the device seems to have fixed the error message, and it's currently showing in Device Manager as a "USB Mass Storage Device", although still invisible to Explorer.
The really strange part, however, is that whenever this flash drive is inserted into the internal USB hub, any other USB device inserted into the hub after it also becomes unrecognisable. I've tested this with another flash drive and an iPhone charger. The moment the 100 G3 is removed, diskpart suddenly sees the other USB drive connected into the hub.
I considered a virus or some other form of malware, but I can't run a scan on a device that the system can't even see, and as far as I'm aware even running a full system scan won't solve that problem.
What's happened to my USB drive, and (how) can I bring it back to life?
Best Answer
better quickly try to make a copy of the disk when it becomes recognized. sometimes when you shut down and restart your computer it recognizes it, try to make a complete copy of the disk using a free program that can create a twin of the raw data just in case it becomes more corrupted you might be able to recover files from a copy of the disk drive.