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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I assume the drive in question is not the 'Generic USB Flash Disk USB Device' shown in your Disk Drives section of Device Manager?

If you get the device connected sound then Windows has recognised that there is a device plugged in there (so plug-and-play will have installed a driver for it). If Windows then doesn't show the drive it's because either the partition information on the drive is damaged so that Windows can't read it, or it's not an NTFS or FAT formatted drive.

I don't suppose you could try the USB drive in another PC/laptop?
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
So it sounds like the hardware itself is detected.

You could try diskpart.

Pop the stick in.
Launch an elevated command prompt
Type:
diskpart <enter>
list volume <enter>

At this point you can hopefully see the USB device - it'll match the size

select volume x <enter> <-- where x is the volume number identified above
assign letter=X (where X is any free drive letter)

See if it now appears.

Obviously, where i've put <enter> I mean press the enter key, not type <enter> :)
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
That's not great That suggests the stick may be faulty as on the face of it it's being physically detected but Windows can't determine anything about it.

What is also odd then is that drive letters do appear to be assigned - D and F for volumes 4 and 5

On a related note, do you know what volume 5 is?

From a command prompt, can you access D: or F:?

Easeus have one other thing to try: attrib -h -r -s /s /d d:\*.* though I don't believe this will help.

If not, you're into data recovery territory. That is always fraught on a USB stick.

One such vendor is Easeus: https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/sd-card-usb-drive-pen-drive-0-bytes.html
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Hi Sorry I forgot to mention I had tried it on another Laptop and it still doesn't work, I even tried it on a printer and the printer can't see the device.

I can't safely remove the drive either since it can't find it so I just have to take it out. When I do remove it, it makes a noise to say the drive has been removed.

I checked device manager again and you can see from the previous post there are two USB mass storage devices, with no USB plugged in there is only one, I've managed to open the properties of the USB but I can't do much with it.

I think the stick is dead. Either it's faulty (quite likely), the partition table is damaged (in which case a file recovery tool might help - if you're very lucky), or it's not NTFS or FAT formatted.
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
I think the stick is dead. Either it's faulty (quite likely), the partition table is damaged (in which case a file recovery tool might help - if you're very lucky), or it's not NTFS or FAT formatted.

Even if it were formatted HPFS/EXT2/3/4 etc it'd show _something_ in Disk Manager. And most likely offer to format the stick when plugged in, in that wonderfully helpful way that Windows does... :)
 
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