All of a sudden, my flash drive needs to be formated

What. The. Fuck. A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to go play a game I have on my flash drive, but Vista says it’s not formated. I can’t defragment, I can’t CHKDSK, I can’t do anything except format it.

Is there a way to keep all the (important) files I had on it?

Nope. (except try it on a different PC)

Next time don’t trust flash.

Don’t trust flash… It’s a USB key, what else than Flash could it be?

A hard drive.

Next time use the safely remove hardware tool in windows and you wont have this problem. :stuck_out_tongue:

I never remove it. It’s always in my comp. In the last few months I think I removed it twice or so.

You’re going to have to download all of your porn again.

I occasionally have a similar problem happen with my SD cards. My suggestion is to try plugging your drive into a different USB port, or if that’s not possible, restart your PC and then try plugging it in again. If that doesn’t work, try it in a different PC. If you do get it to work, copy all the data from it and then do a full format before dropping all the data back into it.

And no, I’ve been using USB for years. I NEVER use the eject hardware safely and I’ve never have had any data lost as a result. All eject hardware safely does anyway is make sure that you’re not actively writing anything to the drive, but if you are, it’s not like it cancels anything, so if something hangs, you end up having to unplug it without using the safe eject anyway.

Google ‘partition recovery’ and file recovery. Download some of those and see how they work.

That’s bad, if it didn’t die of overheating, it probably died of static shock from the PC’s case.

there are software programs that allow you restore lost data from all kinds of devices , something like the team tried when the big crash happend , try talking to them to see what they used .

I highly doubt the tools they used can be applied to a 16GB USB stick, and I doubt even more they’re free.

Doesn’t hurt to try. And there are lots of free ones. Google bro.

I tried some Recovery tools I found on Google. The free ones didn’t recover anything, and the not-free ones recovered some things, but I had to pay to access them.

You seem like an internet savvy kind of guy. Go download the serials elsewhere.

I tried, but strangely cracks for recovery softwares are pretty rare.

Gimme the name I’ll get you the crack

Also try the sandisk recovery tool for flash drives, worked on many things for me, even after format!

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.