Killed My USB Drive

[Jonj1611]

Just wondered if anyone else has seen something like this, left my USB drive plugged into the PC the other night when I turned it off, assuming it would be remounted the next morning when turning it back on but it didn't show up.

I can see the device in device manager and in disk manager but no drive letter and no option to assign one and also says that the drive capacity is zero. Also doesn't show up in a laptop.

In Device Manager it shows as a Portable Device and all information under "details" is complete, nothing missing and says drive is working correctly

In Disk Manager its just shows up as Disk 5 Removable (J - No Media but no partition information whether empty or partitioned

Before I start messing around with diskpart anyone had this happen before? There is nothing on the USB stick that is any worth apart from the 5 hours of making a playlist for the car!

[Scryder]

Is it a Seagate drive? I had a similar thing happen a while back to two Seagate drives, when I plugged them it... they just won't show up. I tried a lot of things, including downloading latest drivers, and looking for a solution on the net.

Re-assigning the drive letter (then restarting, I think) was the only thing that worked once, then stopped again. So I decided to back up everything valuable on a WD drive... and now the two Seagate drives are sitting gathering dust.

One was a Seagate Expansion dive which had a ton of other issues, including prevention of re-start of the PC (unless it was unplugged)! Never did figure out the cause...

[Jonj1611]

Hi, no as I mentioned it's a USB stick and I cannot reassign the drive letter as I can't even assign a drive letter currently.

It's a Kingston Data Traveller 3.0

[Scryder]

Ah stick, nevermind then... missed that bit in the last sentence of your post!

[g8ina]

Lifetime Warranty ??

[Jonj1611]

5 year warranty but God knows where the receipt is now. It's not the end of the world just annoying that I spent ages on that playlist lol

[Scryder]

Yeah, that's the worst part. I have an iPod Touch with baby photos of my daughter... it crashed... I didn't have a PC or laptop at the time, so was never able to back it up (didn't think cloud backup was important then!)... I still have the drive in vain hope to recover that data one day...

[Jonj1611]

Have been there myself, which is why I have 2 backups running, one to an external hard drive and the other online storage. However in this instance its not something I thought about as really why would you. Well until now that is

[g8ina]

I have a 5TB + 4TB NAS, a 2TB in the PC and an external 2x2TB, backups of backups.

[Jonj1611]

I have Easeus running daily backups but this was one of those times I didn't think I would need it, oh how I wish I had used it now!

[kompukare]

Bit of a long shot, but have you tried under Linux / a live Linux?
Always a good way to test out hardware, or in this case get a totally different OS with totally different drivers to give a second opinion.

[matts-uk]

Just wondered if anyone else has seen something like this, left my USB drive plugged into the PC the other night when I turned it off, assuming it would be remounted the next morning when turning it back on but it didn't show up.

Yep. Customers bring failed Flash sticks and SD cards into the workshop pretty regularly. Latest was a HP branded, 64GB flash stick that was in last month. Think I used test disk to get the data off, then clean in diskpart and reformat with Rufus. Customer didn't want to trust it so we put his photos on a replacement stick.

I have a bunch of different disk recovery tools, so it might not have been test disk.

[Jonj1611]

I might try testdisk. Nothing to lose at this point. Failing that will give Linux a go as well

If none of that works will cut my losses. Poor playlist, I barely knew her

[Jonj1611]

Testdisk couldn't even find a partition or evidence of a deleted one

[Saracen999]

I've had that happen with a few USB sticks over the years, and never yet found a way round it. That said, I've never lost anything that mattered enough to be prepared to spend much time trying, and certainly not enough to be willing to pay someone else to do so. I just don't, based on that experience, trust them enough to risk anything important or valuable. Mainly, I use them for things like moving a copy of data from A to B, or copies of music from home to car, etc. That kind of thing. If a few basic tests and attempts don't effect recovery, stick stick in bin (and I mean rubbish bin, not a computer trash bin) and get new one. It's also why I only buy small, cheapish (but branded) ones these days. And yes, before someone tells me, I'm aware of the fakes.

[Jonj1611]

Yes its going to go in the bin, I have tried everything I can. Going to take it apart and put it under the microscope to see if anything obvious is going on and if not will go to the bin