I have been handed a PILZ flash drive from my friend, because it is apparently broken - indeed, it is. Connecting it to my computer instantly installed it's driver as a "XXXXXXXX U177CONTROLLER" device with 0MB of space, trying to view it results in a "Please insert media" message from Windows. I've read around, and found no fix for almost 2 hours now and I'm left totally clueless.
6301
I have a USB flash drive which is no longer recognized by my computer. Windows Disk Management and DiskPart report No Media with no storage space (0 bytes) on the drive and I cannot partition or format the drive:     If the drive appears in Windows Explorer, trying to access it returns an error message indicating that there is no disk inserted, such as the following:     Please insert a disk into drive X:.   Various disk partitioning and data recovery utilities don't recognize the drive or only give a generic name for the drive and cannot access the contents of the drive.  What can I do? How do I recover data from the drive?     This question comes up often and the answers are usually the same. This post is meant to provide a definitive, canonical answer for this problem. Feel free to edit the answer to add additional details.
84067
How can I find the files that were stored on my flash drive before I installed Ubuntu to it?   Edit: No, I didn't format it, my files are still on the flash drive root. I just need to know how to access them there.
123590
I have a Sandisk Cruzer 16GB USB flash drive, but it started to show up as 16MB. And I can't use it, it tells me that I need to format the drive or Please insert a disk into drive X. What software do I need to check the flash drive?  I can't format it since the format fails, and it shows as 16MB instead of 16GB.
5461
I have a flash drive that was used primarily on a Mac, and it was ejected improperly.  Now when I put it back in, the computer (I tried 2 different Macs and 3 PCs) does not even register the flash drive- it does not show up in Finder or in My Computer. Any ideas how to get the lost files back?
69144
I could probably copy the contents from the package, but what is the best way to create an install Flash Drive for Mavericks?  Of course ideally the drive should be bootable.
46609
Recently, I bought an USB flash drive which has a cool design.  The seller said it is 256GB however, I've already known that capacity would be fake. Anyway, I bought it cause of its cool design and want to use this USB flash drive anyway.  What should I do?  I've tried to find a proper tool(vid 1908 / pid 1320) but couldn't. Can I repair this through Low level format? Or partitioning this through Linux?
120628
i want to write a device driver but not able to find the header file can someone please help me find them?Also if someone can point out some important site links that would be really appreciated
17871
I have installed Debian 8/Jessie minimal ISO on my laptop. I get error message during system installation:  Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The firmware can be loaded from removable media, such as a USB stick or floppy. The missing firmware files are: iwlwifi-7265-9.ucode iwlwifi-7265-8.ucode If you have media available now, insert it, and continue. Load missing firmware from removable media?  I found the appropriate firmware on Debian website, downloaded it (zip), extracted to flash drive, and booted with flash drive plugged in. I still get the error message that appropriate firmware could not be found (the error message disappear to fast to copy down). How do I properly format the flash drive? Or is the problem here something else? Windows Explorer on another computer tells me the flash drive is 14.6GB and formatted as FAT32.
33724
My laptop got broken (by what it seems the graphics card burned) and it is so old that it is not worth fixing it.   I took the harddrive from it and tried to use it as external hard drive with other computer, however I cannot access all the data, ie anything that is inside my user folder (it shows it to be empty). Couldn't find anything to solve it.
70686
I'm hoping someone can help! I recently downloaded a torrent directly onto an external hard drive, (using a 2009 MacBook Pro and 1TB Seagate Expansion portable Drive) somehow during the download the drive was accidentally ejected, since this incident when I plug the drive back in it’s having problems reading.  The drive works fine for about 10 minutes, I can read/copy/paste and access files but then starts to wreak havoc; apps hangs, it hangs the Finder, etc.  I’ve tried repairing it in Disk Utility, which reads and repairs this disk but problems inevitably continue as described above.  I’ve deleted the Torrent file also. All my files on this external drive so re-formatting is not an option until I can retrieve them.
55018
My technophobe mother returned from a European trip to discover she'd erased all but 15 images from a nearly full 2GB card. As I am the computer guy in the family, she posted the card to me and asked that I make something magical happen.  The photos were taken with and deleted by a Nikon Coolpix. (I don't know the model.)  I am a Linux guy, but there is a Windows Vista box at my disposal.  What is my best strategy to try to recover something?
118180
When I type in lsusb, the device appears as ID 2357:0108  That's right, it's blank at the end. I've updated the usb ids yet its always blank. I have no idea what to install to make this thing work. I'm dual booting on mac osx
82856
I've made a bit of a balls up...  When attempting to create a bootable Ubuntu usb drive I accidentally ran dd on my main system drive :(  sudo dd if=/path/to/image.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m   I realised what I'd done pretty quickly but everything seemed fine so I re-ran the command on the correct drive /dev/disk2 and thought "phew not sure how I got away with that"... Then things started going wrong... I could continue using the applications I had open but opening anything new / accessing the hdd caused that thing to lock.  Sadly I haven't been using time machine, lesson learnt!   I spoke to AppleCare who said I need to reformat the machine but I'm really hoping there's some way to restore whatever 1m I destroyed (I'm assuming something to do with the partition information). Wishful thinking?  Also, AppleCare told me to restart, which means I can only user repair mode utils.  Help!
36396
Some kinda voodoo, indeed.  Bought a new boot drive, and it's time to use the old drive for data. I thought I'd save some time by just wiping the unneeded system folders, instead of backing up, formatting, and restoring. Wups!  I have a single Adobe file that absolutely will not be deleted. G:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\flash9.ocx - though it may have started with a different file name. I'm able to rename it, oddly enough.  To be clear, the drive is currently plugged in externally. So I can boot the computer, plug this drive in afterward, and immediately attempt to delete. "File in use" box reads "the action can't be completed because the file is open in another program".  I'd format at this point, but it's my white whale, and I have to know if Adobe has inserted some nasty little registry hack - or whatever it is - making this impossible.  Since I'm sure it'll come up, I've taken ownership of the file - and this was the trick preventing me from deleting anything else on the drive - full rights on the file permissions, you name it, I've fiddled with the file itself.   I'm about to try uninstalling flash from the system drive, in case that aligns the planets properly. Sometimes I wish I were less stubborn, and could just format already.
21957
Just bought a new TP-LINK tl-wn727n usb thumb drive.  I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit. When I plug the stick in, nothing happens.  This may be normal for Linux veterans but as a new Linux user coming from Windows it seems weird.   I used the lsusb command and the device appears in the terminal as:  Bus 002 Device 007: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter  It is not showing up in the network connections list and I have no idea where to go from here.
25678
I'd like to build a version of Ubuntu that has absolutely no ability to recognize any USB device inserted. Is this possible?  There's the issue that mouses and keyboards nowadays are connected via usb, so I wonder if it's possible to recognize these but not everything else.  In the end it's a security measure, so different solutions to achieve this goal are also welcome.
3457
During my attempt to upgrade my Xubuntu 14.04 installation with  sudo apt-get dist-upgrade   I made the mistake of interrupting the process by closing my laptop, which caused it to suspend to disk. After re-opening, the monitor remained black, so I was forced to reboot the system. I have since discovered many failures of drivers (wlan0 missing, USB memory stick cannot be mounted, USB mouse not recognised, and maybe more undiscovered problems with hardware).   My beginner's attempts to manually repair the single problems could have made it even worse. During the installation of the current distribution I chose to encrypt my whole hard disk.