For several years, and even more so since the disappearance of the optical drives, USB flash drives are one of the favorite tools for users to transmit data from one place to another. They are small, cheap, fast and with quite large capacities, which is why we have almost all of them in our drawer. However, what happens when the falla pen drive and start giving you problems? Has the time come throw it? We will see it.
Like all Flash-based devices, USB drives have a limited life cycle, and there may come a time when they say enough and stop working. However, if the USB stick breaks down once, it does not necessarily mean that we have to change it for another one, and below we will teach you how to know if it is really “dead” or if the problem has a solution.
Is it worth trying to backup the failed USB drive?
If you have a USB flash drive that’s unusable, has stopped working for some reason, or is just giving you trouble, you’ll find that Windows won’t even allow you to format the drive to use it again. In the worst case, you won’t even see the name of the USB device on your PC, and there are many reasons why you may encounter these problems, such as partition errors that eat up your disk storage space ( note: if the problem is physical, like in the following image, don’t even bother: throw the USB drive in the trash because it’s not worth trying to recover).
First, you need to be clear on the difference between an “unformattable” or “unusable” USB drive and a USB drive with corrupted or damaged data (the PC detects the drive but gives an error when it tries to interact with its data). When the device is damaged beyond repair, you will have no other option but to throw it away and replace it with another one, but if the PC simply does not detect it or does not let you use it, it is possible to repair it in many cases.
Let’s take as an example the typical situation where the PC detects the device but doesn’t let you do anything with what’s inside. Open a file explorer window (Win + E) and go to the computer, with the list of storage units. Right click on the USB drive, select Properties and in the Hardware tab see if Windows detects that it is working properly.
If the operating system tells you it’s working fine, it’s definitely worth trying to back it up. Open a Command Prompt window (right-click on the Start button and select Command Prompt (Admin), or if you have Windows 11, Windows Terminal (Admin)) and type the following command:
chkdsk X: /f /x
In the command above, you need to replace the X with the drive letter assigned to your USB key, for example D:
We have often told you about the “Check Disk” utility, chkdsk, which checks and fixes problems in storage units. In this case, the /f variable tells it to try to fix any errors it finds, and the /x variable tells Windows to “unmount” the drive before scanning it, so we can make sure that no files are there. and that the analysis runs smoothly.
In the screenshot we gave you above, we can see that we are facing a USB drive that does not fail, it is completely healthy and without errors, but if your USB drive fails, errors will appear and chkdsk will try to repair them.
The radical solution to solve the problems
If the above didn’t work and your USB drive is still giving you problems despite it’s supposed to be working fine, we can perform a slightly more drastic solution. Right-click on the Start button and select Disk Management. There you will see that your USB flash drive appears at the bottom with the space assigned to it, and this is where you need to right-click and select “Delete Volume”. A window will appear warning us that we are going to delete all data from the unit.
After that, this lower part will have been left in black color (“Unassigned”), so you need to create a new volume. Click on it with the right mouse button and select “New simple volume…” to bring up a simple wizard in which we will only have to press Next all the time until it is finished: when finished, it will have generated a new volume on the USB key that we should be able to use again.
