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flash drive unreadable

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by peteng25

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I recently ran the TrendMicro uptdates on a laptop I support at work.
Afterwards, the computer would not read either the user's personal or the work flash drive.
Plugging the home flash drive into another PC showed the drive's OK, and all files were copied and the drive could be reformatted.
The work flash drive (with, unfortunately, all the work files), was unreadable in any other computers. I've tried a few file recovery utilites (recuva, etc...) and did manage to salvage part, but not all the files.
1) Why, would you think, would an antivirus update make a thumb drive unreadable? Did the update in some way 'mark' the file table on the drive as suspect?
2) I did a system restore since this was WinXP, and the home drive was once again visible on the laptop (remember, it wasn't on this laptop, although was read on any other computer). Seems to point to something about the AV?...
Any input/suggestions/idea would be greatly appreciated, as I would very much like to clear up my thoughts on this. So, thanks all in advance

Peter

4 replies

by wmatthews

I had the same thing happen to me. There is a very good product called Handy Recovery which will handle your problem. The full version is about $39 dollars, the trial version will permit you to restore 1 file per day. It is well worth the money though as I was able to get all but one of my files back. Let me know.

by wmatthews

Sorry, I forgot to add that once you have the information backed up to your hard drive or something else, you can use the Admin, Computer Management, Disk Management to see the USB drive. From there you should be able to reformat it. Let me know if this helps.

by balthor

It is probably a good idea to copy your flash drive's contents to a CD every once and a while.If your work is important then copy once a day is nice.I would put all files in to one folder so that when you open the drive you see a folder,when you open the folder you see its contents.You only need to copy the folder to a CD and all of the other files will copy.There would be some firmware in the flash drive maybe a virus got lodged in there.

by d.s.williams

I had a similar thing happen to me with not only my flash drive, but also my SD card. I borrowed an MP3 player (MP3 jukebox, used by friend who had previously only used it with his Mac) on which some sermons had been recorded via line-in from the sound system at church. My computer failed to recognise it at first, say it it was not formatted. After restarting the system it found it, but then it aas only able to recognise that MP3 player and claimed my flash drive and SD card were not formatted, although I could read them fine on other computers. It was only after checking for root kits that they became accessible again, but I have steered clear of the MP3 jukebox since then!

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