# Are there any troubleshooting tips for flash drives?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-troubleshooting-tips-for-flash-drives/507548>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [August 24, 2009, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-troubleshooting-tips-for-flash-drives/507548 "2009-08-24T21:00:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\
**Post date:** [August 24, 2009, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-troubleshooting-tips-for-flash-drives/507548/1 "2009-08-24T21:00:17Z")

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I have a (Verbatim store’n’go) flash drive that has stopped working. It now get the **USB Device Not Recognized** error message on all computers I’ve plugged it into. I don’t think there’s anything vital on this drive that’s not backed up somewhere else, but it’s a pain to have to reload it (especially since I have motherboard problems with my computer at the moment).

Are there any quick tricks that might fix a flash drive? Anyone ever had this problem and managed to resolve it?

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**Author:** ![Bewildebeest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/779978/32.png) [@Bewildebeest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bewildebeest)\
**Post date:** [August 25, 2009, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-troubleshooting-tips-for-flash-drives/507548/2 "2009-08-25T19:00:09Z")

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I had a similar problem. I did an fsck (file system consistency check) under linux and it worked after that.

Incidentally, does your computer have a VIA chipset?

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