I believe that the flash drive failed even though it has been over a year since I bought it. It was working fine up until the first Windows 11 update in November of this year.

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I believe that the flash drive failed even though it has been over a year since I bought it. It was working fine up until the first Windows 11 update in November of this year.

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Hi Patrick. I'm Greg, here to help you with this.

It sounds like it might have failed, but let's make sure.

Please try all these steps for USB flash stick not detected:

Try all other USB ports. The ports on the opposite side usually use another USB controller.

Plug in the USB drive, go into Settings > Devices > Autoplay to find the device, in the drop down menu choose what you want it to do.

If it doesn't show up right click Start to open Disk Management, scroll down to find the drive by size and type, if indicated initialize or format it, or right click to assign a letter.

If that doesn't help then right click Start to open Device Manager, find the drive under USB or other device categories, right click to Uninstall Driver, restart PC to reinstall the driver.

Then right click all USB controller drivers to Uninstall, restart PC to reinstall them,

If it still doesn't show up, is it read in another PC? If so copy it's files into a folder on the desktop, test the flash stick with diagnostics here:

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-check-and-te...

If it passes diagnostics clean and then format the drive:

http://www.howtogeek.com/235824/how-to-clean-a-...

Finally run a DIsk Check: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/gu...

Only if it passes both tests would I trust it further.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask back any questions and keep me posted. If you'll wait to rate whether my post helped you, I will keep working with you until it's resolved.

________________________________________________________

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[SOLVED] How to Fix a Broken USB Stick and Recover Data
Continuing to use your broken USB drive, even if it’s for the sake of flash drive repair, can be detrimental to the data it holds. Therefore, you should use a reliable USB data recovery tool to get the data back. Disk Drill is our go-to recovery solution when dealing with broken USB drives. It’s designed to work directly with the USB drive, meaning it can scan it when it’s corrupted, RAW, or constantly displaying error messages or requesting you to format. The same is true if it’s not appearing in most places, like File Explorer.
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My computer can't read my usb drive. I've already determined that it is the drive via using a different computer and checking different drives(all but this one work). It was working just fine yesterday. All I can do is eject it.

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