USB stick not recognized

This is a 1GB thumb drive and its been working just fine. Put some files on it with this machine with the intent of transferring to another machine (which did not come to pass). Now I get this error;

WTF?

Tried all 4 ports. Went to Device manager (which says all is good), Disk Managment and Computer (which both show no drive present) and checked I have Admin privileges. Did a search here and found a few similar issues but no resolution.

When inserted, the thumb drive lights, indicating that at least the light works .

I don't have another one to test if the ports are otherwise functional. Tired it in another machine and it didn't seem to be read there either but I'm also not sure that machine has a good USB port.

Do these things suddenly die?

Hi, try this, go into Device Manager and right click on your Device, and when the option window come's up select Uninstall and click ok, when it has Uninstalled the Device click the button on the top of the Device Manager page that says,
Scan for hardware changes,
let windows reinstall it and see if that helps.

RogerR said:

This is a 1GB thumb drive and its been working just fine. Put some files on it with this machine with the intent of transferring to another machine (which did not come to pass). Now I get this error;

WTF?

Roger Hi and welcome

USB sticks like any other storage device can and do go bad, but I suspect something else. did you have any encrption (bit defender) on either machine? Both machines are win 7?

Kenn J+

File systems on USB drives can also become corrupted. I'm not sure what the error displayed would be in this case, but it'd certainly be worth running a full chkdsk pass on the USB stick (and cannot cause any harm).

Hmm .. "N" would be next. Computer lists L: and M: but I think they are the ones on my case (which says; "Insert Disk" when queried) and not the ones on my monitor.

Qdos said:

it'd certainly be worth running a full chkdsk pass on the USB stick

How to do that when the stick is not read ?

zigzag3143 said:

USB sticks like any other storage device can and do go bad, but I suspect something else. did you have any encrption (bit defender) on either machine? Both machines are win 7?

Thanks, Kenn. Great site here.

I had occasion to check if file encryption was enabled and it was not. Is Bit Defender any different?

I was trying to set up Win7 on other machine (wireless card not recognized) and copying drivers to the USB drive. That ended up being kinda circular and I just hauled the new machine to the router and plugged it in direct. I got 7 x32 installed on that but not sure the USB ports are hunky dory.