I ran into this once with a thumb drive full of photos, and the first mistake I almost made was trying to ‘fix’ it right away.
Don’t do anything to the USB yet. Leave it alone for a minute. Skip formatting. Skip CHKDSK. Don’t copy new stuff onto it. Every write makes recovery harder, and sometimes it turns a recoverable mess into a dead end.
What I’d check first:
- Plug it into a different USB port.
- Test it on another computer.
- See if the drive shows up in Disk Management on Windows or Disk Utility on Mac.
- Write down any error text you see, especially stuff like “You need to format the disk before you can use it.”
If your system still sees the device at all, I’d go straight to file recovery instead of trying random repair tools.
I had decent results with Disk Drill when Windows could detect the USB but refused to read the file system. It scanned the drive anyway and pulled out files I thought were gone.
What I’d do, step by step:
- Install Disk Drill on your main drive or another healthy disk, not on the damaged USB.
- Plug in the USB and open Disk Drill.
- Pick the USB from the device list.
- Start the scan and let it finish, even if it feels slow.
- Preview what it finds so you know the files are intact.
- Recover everything to a different drive. Do not save recovered files back onto the bad USB.
If the files matter a lot, I’d be more cautious and make a byte-for-byte backup image first inside Disk Drill, then scan the image instead of the original USB. I’ve done this with flaky drives, and it felt safer because I wasn’t hammering the same failing device over and over.
After your data is out, then deal with the USB itself. Reformat it if you want to test whether it still has any life left. Recovery first, repair later.