I’ve got a 2 gig thumb drive that worked perfectly for the three or so times I’ve used it, until this morning. I transferred some files onto it. Later, I plugged it in again and was going to transfer more files to it, but kept getting the message “Please insert a disk into Drive H:.” I brought it to work, same thing. The LED lights up when you plug it in, a Removable Drive shows up in My Computer, the Eject/Unplug icon appears in the systray, but I can’t access the drive to explore the contents.
I ran the troubleshooter, and it says the device is working properly. I don’t know what happened. Is it hosed? Why would it work one minute and not the next?
If the drive contains irreplaceable data that is worth $1000-2000 to you then send it to a professional data recovery place. Do not mess with it any further.
Otherwise, delete the partition in Disk Management (Start|Run|diskmgmt.msc), re-create it, and format it. If that doesn’t work then the drive is probably hosed.
Did you recently map another drive (like a network share) that uses the same letter designation? USB drives are picky about using the same drive letter they used before even if that letter has since been taken by some other network resource.
Also try going into device manager and select “scan for hardware changes”.
Well, the drive shows up in the Disk Manager, but there’s no media on it, and I can’t format it or do any other thing with it. This is really stupid. It worked this morning!