“USB device not recognized” – SanDisk memory stick

“USB device not recognized” – SanDisk memory stick

Mr. Afrim Constantin,

It was working fine two days ago but not now. In such cases the very first pretty good thing to do is think about all what you have done in these two days. Revive all your activities done on your system during these days. Have you updated the operating system? Have you made any hardware change like motherboard, RAM etc? Is there some special software installed by you?

If any of these questions has answer in yes just check that matter which is not allowing the drive to communicate with the system. But if nothing like that happened the problem is with drive try repairing it using some utility it might be damaged or having bad sectors.

“USB device not recognized” – SanDisk memory stick

If you receive “USB device not recognized” when connecting your USB flash drive on the USB port, either the drive malfunctioned or it has a problem. A USB flash drive can malfunction when it is not correctly inserted on the USB port. In this case, just remove the flash drive from the port and plug it back in. This should fix the problem.

If the drive triggers an error on one USB port, try plugging it on another USB port. If this doesn’t work and the error remains, it means the drive is in error. In this case, you need to check it for errors using a drive utility application. Download PC Tools Performance Toolkit and install. Once installed, start PC Tools then go to “Recovery” tab and click “Repair Drives”.

On the next screen, select the drive you want to check, in this case, the drive letter for the USB flash drive. From the options, select “Surface Scan”. Click “Start” then wait until the repair is complete. The checking will be quite long depending on the size of the drive and the extent of the problem. If bad sectors were found, try repeating the scan a second time.

If this doesn’t work, try formatting the drive. This will be the last step if everything else fails. If this doesn’t work, it is possible that the drive is failing. USB flash drives have a much shorter lifespan than normal hard drives. A normal hard drive like IDE and SATA contains plates where data is written and stored.

A USB flash drive uses only a chip just like with an SSD hard drive. This is where the data is written and stored. Though data access is much faster with chips compared to plates, the lifespan gets shorter as you copy, move, rename, and delete files. The more frequent you copy files to the drive, the shorter its life will be.

The life of a USB flash drive or the period of its usability depends on the number of “writes” to the drive. As you delete, copy, and move data to the USB flash drive, you are also shortening its life.

When you delete a file or folder on the USB flash drive, it causes a “write” to the drive because you are removing the data from the drive by emptying the space the file or folder occupies. This is the same when you copy data from your hard drive to the USB flash drive, it “writes” the data to the flash drive.

Moving data from another drive to the flash drive or within the flash drive is pretty much the same because it performs both deleting and copying of data. But don’t worry, a USB flash drive has millions of “writes” that’s why it lasts for many years. In your case, if the flash drive still can’t be formatted, just buy a new flash drive and replace it.

It means your flash drive reached its end of life.