[tan]

Hallo everyone. Thank you for taking the time to read my posting.
I recently purchased an 8GB Samsung USB flash drive, and saved sensitive information on it. I used it about 3/4 times after that and it worked fine, but now everytime i try to access the info on the drive, i get the message"Insert disk into drive", although any PC i have used picks up a removable drive when i insert the flash drive. Any ideas on ho i can retrieve my information will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[MJM]

That's strange... do you have another copy of the files? If so you could try formatting the stick.
Another thing you can do (another way to format) is to right click My Computer, select Manage, select Disk Management, find your Device in the list on the right, try creating a partition and formatting or if one exists try reformatting it or deleting, creating a new one and then formatting it.
You could also remove the driver, reboot, then reinsert USB stick.
Another thing to try is to fix the MBR, Google for the appropriate app.

[tan]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I followed your advice, & i can see thru the disk management tools, that there is data on the disk. Its is EXACTLY the same of amount of data i saved, so it is there...somewhere! However trying to access it, i still get the same message " insert disk into drive XX". I don't want to format the USB flash, in case i lose that data, which is more important than the drive itself. Any ideas? By the way, i'm a complete novice when it comes to PC's - sorry.

[MJM]

Have you tried a recovery program?
http://www.softwarepatch.com/software/filerecovery.html
Trying to fix the MBR is another possible solution.
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/U.../HDHacker.html
The other way would be using your Windows CD, boot it, then go into the recovery console and type \help
Then look for a command called map (or similar). This should give you a list of a connected devices, so you USB stick should already be connected.
One of those shoudl be your USB stick, but I am unable to tell you which one from here... you should be able to check the name in the device manager as well (should be something like Device\HardDisk0 etc)
Then you can do fixmbr DEVICENAME (as above).


NOTE: I have never used these programs, they just seemed to do the job, found via Google.