If your computer doesn’t recognize your USB flash drive, you can fix the problem by using one of the applications on your PC. Here’s how to do it
Although they are no longer as popular as they once were, USB flash drives continue to have several admirers and still retain their usefulness: they are convenient, they are easily transported, they cost little and offer plenty of available space and are easily recognized by all PCs. Sometimes, however, the USB flash drive doesn’t want to know how to work.
The inconvenience happens especially with older USB flash drives, those that maybe we have left for months or years in a drawer and then we find them again. But when we insert them to see what data we have put in them, or to load new ones, the external memory is either not recognized by Windows or when we try to read/write data we get an error. This does not mean, however, that all hope is lost: sometimes you can still access the data, while almost always you can at least format it and use it to load other data. Here’s what to do in the latter case, which is the most common.
Is the USB flash drive recognized by Windows?
The first thing to do in case of a “broken” USB flash drive is to check if Windows can still detect it correctly. Insert the flash drive into the USB port and wait a few seconds for Windows to detect it. As soon as it is detected, we have to see if it works or not. Right-clicking on the stick, in File Explorer, we have to choose “Properties” and check if Windows tells us that “The device is working properly”. In this case we can still clean the old data from the USB flash drive and use it again as if it was new.
Wipe the old data from the USB flash drive
If Windows detects the flash drive but can’t read the data, it means that something in the file system of the USB memory has been corrupted. We have to reset everything and start from scratch. To do this we can use the Windows “Diskpart” utility, which works from the command line. After opening the command prompt (running the application as administrator), we can type “Diskpart” to start the utility and, immediately after, run the command “list disk”. We will be notified of all the disks, both fixed and removable, connected to the PC. Among them there will be our main hard disk (usually indicated as “Disk 0”) and the key that we have inserted but does not work.
At this point we must launch the command “select disk” followed by the number assigned to the key by the operating system, which we have read from the previous list. We must be very careful not to select the system disk by mistake, or there will be trouble because now, with the command “clean” we will delete all data. At this point we exit the command prompt and look in the search box of the Start menu for “Disk Management”. With this official Windows utility we can edit the partitions of any disk connected to the PC. We select the drive, right-click and then choose to format the disk. We can choose whether to split the flash drive into two drives or assign all the space to a single partition.