Corrupted data on my flash drive. Retrieval possible?

Hi 7 forum. Long time no post. I have a 16gb PNY flash drive. It has served me well for over 4 years, so it is possible it is just getting to old, but the data on it seems to have become corrupted somehow. I mainly

use this flash drive to transfer media from my Windows PC, to my Xbox or media player, to watch movies on my TV. Recently, I also started using it to run a couple programs, directly from it, one of them is called

Bitmessage (a p2p encrypted messaging program that can be ran portable from a flash for easy traveling) and noticed that on some occasions, when I would go to "safely remove the drive," it would say I could not

because something was still running and windows could not remove it. However, the issue here is that all programs were closed, there was nothing running in the task manager that would suggest that the drive should

not be able to shutdown and be removed safely. Therefore, when the option came up to force remove the drive, I would often click the continue button to remove it. This could be the issue that caused this. I

remember the last time it worked, I plugged it into my Xbox after moving some media files, watched them on my Xbox and then when I plugged the flash into my Windows computer the next day, it showed nothing on

the drive. It was just blank. Even the name of the drive, which I had renamed to something like "my flash drive," instead of its default name, was changed back to it's default name of "PNY 2.0 E:," which was really

weird. The properties shows that the data is still there in relation to space (the files are still taking up the space they had been), and I can even transfer additional media to the drive (for example, I put a James Bond

movie on there, and it shows up fine), but the old data is still corrupted or and only exists in terms of taking up physical space. So I'm pretty confused. What I tried: I tried going into the command prompt and

messing with the attrib, (attrib -h -r -s /s /d e:\*.* That did not work. I tried scanning with malwarebytes, and although it showed that it was indeed scanning the files, it showed no malware. I tried scanning with

avast, again, it scanned the files, but came back saying, "files could not be scanned," but showed the exact number of files on the disk that were not scanned. I have not tried any software yet, I thought I would bring it

to the forums first. One final thing to add. Nothing is on this flash drive that is critical. I have everything backed up two times over, but I did have it well organized on here and was hoping to get it back. Also, if the

files are not retrievable, could I reformat the flash drive (which would erase everything) and be safe to use it again from scratch, without worrying about this happening again, or should I just throw it away and move

on?