Flash Drive Problems

Flash drives are ingenious little devices. Most people are catching on to the incredible ease of use of flash drives. Heck, I have one that boots up to my favorite linux security distribution. This allows me to run an entire operating system via USB. So, even if you had Windows on your computer, I could bypass that and boot to linux - if your computer had USB booting capability. But i digress. Flash memory is great until it bombs out on you. You may get messages saying that your drive isn’t recognized or it may do nothing. What are you to do? Flash drives use the FAT file system. This makes it very readable across many different operating systems. Sometimes that file system just gets whacked out. When this happens, you errors about the medium being unreadable. Sometimes, the master boot sector of your flash drive can get hosed. This will give you messages about the drive being unformatted or it won’t read the drive. You plug in your flash drive and your computer may not detect it as a drive. Some of the tools already on this blog will help you recover data off of your flash drive. If it’s a flash card from a camera, you could try this free photo recovery software.