[Shinigami]

So I have a USB flash drive problem. I have a 2GB Centon DataStick Pro, model DSP2GB-005. It was working fine and i had to backup about a gig of music. I did that and all of sudden it stopped working, i plugged it in my home pc and it was not recognized at all, then I plugged it into my laptop, it also was not recognized at all. I did not get any messages on the bottom right that said the USB was not recognized on either pc. But other USB's worked on the port i had my 2GB USB. I also searched about changing the drive letter in the Disk Management, but it did not show up there at all. I'm pretty sure my usb drivers are working because other usb drives work. Anyone know what's up with my USB? Is it "dead" or broken?

[smax013]

Shinigami, on 05 April 2010 - 12:44 PM, said:

So I have a USB flash drive problem. I have a 2GB Centon DataStick Pro, model DSP2GB-005. It was working fine and i had to backup about a gig of music. I did that and all of sudden it stopped working, i plugged it in my home pc and it was not recognized at all, then I plugged it into my laptop, it also was not recognized at all. I did not get any messages on the bottom right that said the USB was not recognized on either pc. But other USB's worked on the port i had my 2GB USB. I also searched about changing the drive letter in the Disk Management, but it did not show up there at all. I'm pretty sure my usb drivers are working because other usb drives work. Anyone know what's up with my USB? Is it "dead" or broken?

What process do you use to disconnect the flash drive? Do you properly unmount the drive prior to disconnecting it?

Have you tried it with ALL the different USB ports on the two computers?

[Shinigami]

Well, I unplugged it the unproper way, just removing it but it was way after I had transferred the songs and I was not accessing the usb when I unplugged it. I did try all of the usb ports. Same result...usb not recognized at all, I also rebooted my computers but again, same result.

I have read that your usb may not work if you don't remove it safely, but isn't that when the usb led is flashing?

[smax013]

Shinigami, on 05 April 2010 - 04:52 PM, said:

Well, I unplugged it the unproper way, just removing it but it was way after I had transferred the songs and I was not accessing the usb when I unplugged it. I did try all of the usb ports. Same result...usb not recognized at all, I also rebooted my computers but again, same result.

I have read that your usb may not work if you don't remove it safely, but isn't that when the usb led is flashing?

You will get different people saying different things. I was always under the impression that you should not remove it unless you have safely unmounted it, especially for USB flash drives. Keep in mind the USB ports care power and as such, it is possible that "improperly" removing a flash drive could fry either the USB port and/or the flash drive. In theory, a USB hard drive would be a little more protected as the internal drive might be protected, but the USB interface as part of the enclosure could be killed. Thus, with a USB hard drive, you might still be able to recover the data by accessing the internal drive. There is usually no such luck with a flash drive.

The end result is that my suspicion is that your flash drive might be toast. I could be wrong, but that is my leading suspicion at this point. You could try it with a couple other computers just to make sure.

[SnyperTodd]

Generally, you won't do any harm by removing the device without unmounting it unless you have enabled write caching, which is disabled by default. Even if you have write caching enabled and improperly remove the device, you won't do physical harm to it, but you can corrupt whatever data was being written to it.

[coastie65]

I still don't think Hot swapping those things are a good idea though.

[Shinigami]

Thanks for the advice. But with all this, does it mean that i can't access my usb drive and copy my files back to my pc?

[SnyperTodd]

coastie65, on 05 April 2010 - 05:36 PM, said:

I still don't think Hot swapping those things are a good idea though.

No, it's always best to click down in the system tray and safely remove the device.

Shinigami, I don't know what to tell you... I've got several USB flash drives, and I had one just die on me. I copied several files to it, put it up, and when I went to use it the next time, it was dead. It happens sometimes. All I can say is that you never should have just one copy of important files. Hopefully you had a backup. As far as the drive itself, is it still withing the warranty period?