Fix USB Flash Drive Not Recognized & Recover Data – How To Do

Content:

• What To Do When USB Flash Drive Not Recognized
• Fix USB Device Not Recognized Error
• Summary
• Related Articles
• User Comments

Have you ever found your USB device not recognized by computer? Clearly, this is an annoying thing since you'll lose access to all files and folders saved on that USB device. You definitely want to work this out to continue to use the device and regain the data, right?

According to investigation, USB flash drive not recognized/USB flash drive not showing up/USB flash drive not working is a problem that plagues many users. So, today's topic is how to get a USB flash drive to work & how to recover data from USB flash drive. And my advice is to recover data from USB quickly when you regain access to them; otherwise, the files & folders may be gone for good at any moment. After all, you do care more about the data than the USB device itself, right?

The most important thing you need to remember is: stay calm when you find a pen drive not showing up. Believe it or not, you still have a chance to complete USB data recovery and to repair USB flash drive. And a cool head is the decisive factor to make you quickly go out of the woods.

What To Do When USB Flash Drive Not Recognized

Get A Great Tool for Pen Drive Data Recovery

The first thing you're supposed to do is getting MiniTool Power Data Recovery, a piece of reliable data recovery software, and installing it properly on your computer that works fine. This makes great preparations for you to roll up your sleeves and perform USB flash drive data recovery in time. (All the following content is based on Windows platform, if you'd like to recover data from flash drive when it is not recognized by Mac, please resort to MiniTool Mac Data Recovery)

Note: one of the most obvious differences between a free edition and an advanced edition is that the former only allows you to recover 1GB of data, while the latter don't have such limit. But, if you doubt the performance of this software or don't know exactly the total size of files needing to be recovered, you may try the free edition before purchase.

Take Measures to Recover Data from USB Flash Drive

After that, I advise you to test the USB port on your computer, before you take any measures to repair the pen drive.

Then, I advise you to open Windows Disk Management to check. I mean, there're cases in which the USB flash drive/pen drive is detected but not showing in Windows Explorer. For instance, the USB flash drive had no drive letter (the drive letter has already been occupied by other drives) or the partition was lost from it & the disk became unallocated.

In the former case, you'd better assign a drive letter to the USB pen drive by using the built-in Disk Management or the third-party disk management tool like MiniTool Partition Wizard. While in the latter case, please follow the steps given below to recover files from USB.

Step 1: confirm the status of your USB flash drive and choose a corresponding functional module from the following main interface. (When the pen drive shows up in Disk Management as unallocated space, you should click on "Lost Partition Recovery")

By the way, to recover permanently deleted files, you should click on "Undelete Recovery"; to recover files from a broken USB flash drive or when pen drive detected but not opening, you should click on "Damaged Partition Recovery".

Step 2: select the USB flash drive to perform a full scan on it by clicking on "Full Scan" button in the lower right corner.

Step 3: check all the data you want to recover at the end of the full scan and press "Save" button to set a safe storage location for them.

Note: please purchase a license to upgrade your free copy of MiniTool Power Data Recovery when you see the prompt window shown above. Then, continue to finish the rest work of USB flash drive file recovery with the registered copy.

Well, what if you find your USB flash drive/pen drive not showing in disk management? You must want to know to get a computer to recognize a flash drive, right? Please continue to read.

Fix USB Device Not Recognized Error

A great number of USB flash drive users are wondering how could their drive not detected by computer or other equipment all of a sudden. They need to know the exact causes so that the device not recognized problem could be solved and the device itself can be used again.

In this part, I'll summarize 8 reasons that are responsible for the pen drive not detected problem. And then, give corresponding suggestions on how to fix a flash drive that won't read.

7 Common Reasons Why USB Device Is Not Showing Up & How to Fix

• USB driver is not installed properly.
  

  This is considered as one of the most widespread failures occurred on USB flash drive device. After the USB device was inserted into a computer, the system will prompt "Found New Hardware" and start to install the driver. However, if you cancel the installation process for feeling risky or troublesome, it will lead to failure in loading USB drive normally. Thus, this USB flash drive can't be recognized by the system.

  

  Solution:
  Open Windows Disk Management -> refresh the corresponding interface to see whether the USB drive will be reloaded and reinstalled or just find the USB device with a question mark -> right click to uninstall it -> reconnect USB device to the computer to install.

  

• USB device is disabled in CMOS.
  

  This situation is commonly seen in public places like café, net-bar, school computer room and office. USB interface is disabled for the safety of computer; it's very understandable.

  Solution:
  Enter CMOS -> find USB device from related setting items in the motherboard -> change the state from disable to enable.

  

• The power supply of the USB port is not sufficient.
  

  Each USB device can only work normally under certain power supply conditions. If the USB port provides insufficient power supply, those signs will appear – the USB indicator does not flash or its state is abnormal; system fails to boot as usual after USB device is connected to the computer; the content in USB device can't be accessed or the access speed is much slower than before.

  Solution:
  Change a USB port or provide separate external power supply to the USB device. Or when choosing from various USB flash drives, you could buy a low-powered one.

• Unconventional flash memory chip and technology.
  

  Manufacturers of the newly installed USB device used unconventional flash memory chip and technology to make the flash drive: this situation can be mainly divided into two types.

  a). in order to protect their own chip technology, some large companies choose to use non-standard chip or encrypt data read and write mechanism; or they just decide not to share chip parameters with others, stopping USB driver writers from writing corresponding driver.
  b). some small companies or illegal small workshops create their USB device with inferior-quality fittings.

  Solution:
  Go to manufacturers' official website to download the latest USB driver package or find the original CD driver.

• The virus attacked USB flash drive.
  

  If your flash drive was exchanging data with other devices which are infected by a virus or some of the files you saved in the flash drive contains a virus, it is very possible that this drive can't be detected successfully. This is because the virus may damage the driver or files which are needed for the normal working of the device.

  

  Solution:
  If the virus is detected in flash drive, you'd better seek ways to recover data from USB device before trying to kill the virus with a powerful antivirus program. Please note that the files may be hidden by virus sometimes.

• The OS used in computer is excessively simplified.
  

  In general, the built-in driver package of common Microsoft OS already contains a lot of drivers approved by Microsoft. So, it's able to identify many device drivers automatically, of course, including USB device driver. Nevertheless, in various simplified versions of Windows OS, the corresponding drivers are also simplified.

  Solution:
  Find the official driver or make use of a third-party driver tool.

• USB device is damaged physically.
  

  Convenient as USB flash drive is, it is often damaged by frequent plug in and out, magnetic interference, high temperature and other factors. Thus, pen drive not working at all is not a rare thing.

  Solution:
  If your USB device encounters hardware failure, you can check the broken component and replace it with a new one or turn to professional recovery companies to recover data from it.

1 Special Reason Why Pen Drive Is Not Detected by Xbox 360

If the USB flash drive is used on Xbox 360 when you find flash drive can't be recognized, there's a special reason other than the above-mentioned ones. That is: the first partition of USB flash drive is not a FAT32 partition.

Since Xbox 360 could only recognize the USB flash drive under the condition that its first drive is formatted as FAT32, you must check the file system of USB flash drive to see whether it satisfies this condition or not. After confirming the cause, you're able to take measures to make things right.

Solution:
Adopt MiniTool Partition Wizard – the professional partition management tool to fix.
If you find your USB flash drive is not recognized on Xbox 360, please check whether the first partition of it is formatted as FAT32 or not. If it is a FAT32 partition, you need to try above methods to fix it; if it is formatted as NTFS, you need to convert it to FAT32 with an advanced edition of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Please run MiniTool Partition Wizard -> select your USB flash drive -> choose "Convert NTFS to FAT" from left action panel or right-click menu -> click "Apply" in upper left corner to confirm change.

Just high-five yourself if you have solved your problem after reading above content. However, if accidents happen while you're trying to fix the flash drive not detected problem, data saved in USB flash drive are easy to be put in danger. So you must be careful enough.

Summary

In a word, USB interface makes it a breeze to exchange data among different computers and devices. As far as I know, either USB flash drives or external hard drives are easy to use. But there's great chance that you may find yourself stuck in this situation: after connecting the USB flash drive to a Windows PC or another device through a USB port, you disappointedly discover the problem – USB flash drive can't be recognized.

As I have mentioned, USB flash drive not recognized problem is not rare; hundreds of thousands of users are facing or have met the same situation. Of course, all of them want to fix it easily and safely, but it turns out that more than half of them failed. That is why I'm writing this – to help you recover data from USB drive and fix the USB device not recognized error.

Reading here, it's easy to find out that MiniTool Power Data Recovery is a powerful and clean recovery tool to get back all lost data from USB. It is easy to use: it only takes 3 easy steps to successfully regain your data no matter they're saved in a removable disk like USB flash drive or the computer internal hard drive.

Besides, you must hurry up to take the corresponding measures to fix the pen drive not recognized problem yourself, in order to make it usable again.

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