If you’ve worked with computers long enough you inevitably know the gut wrenching feeling you get when you insert a promotional USB flash drive and the computer won’t read it.
Now, if your drive was damaged you’ll want to send it off to a data recovery company, or if the information isn’t essential and you like to tinker, take the drive apart and do a little bit of digital triage yourself.
Often, however, the promotional USB flash drive isn’t damaged, it just doesn’t want to be recognized. Here’s what you can do to breath new life into your drive should it not want to send and receive data willingly. Insert the promotional USB flash drive into the USB port. Wait a bit and see if it appears in your “My Computer” window. If it does, click on the icon and left click. Select Format and choose the Fat32 option. Click start and the drive should start to erase everything that’s on it and reformat it.
If the drive doesn’t appear in the window, you can try this technique:
1. Shut your computer down.
2. Insert the USB drive into the port.
3. Restart your computer.
4. When you’re prompted, hit the F8 key. Depending on your operating system it could also be F2. A note on the screen usually tells you what to do.
This will take you to your system bios.
5. Navigate to your bios and boot from the CD drive first. Save this and exit.
6. Insert you System Restart disk. The computer should restart.
7. Follow the instructions. There will be an option that allows you to select a drive. You should see the promotional USB disk listed there.
8. Select the disk and format it.
9. Reset your computer to boot from the hard drive of your computer instead of the CD. The drive should be working again.
On a Mac, the repair process works a bit differently. To reformat the drive, you’ll want to go into Utilities in your Applications folder.
1. Open Utilities. With any luck your promotional USB flash drive should appear in the window on the left, along with your other installed drives.
2. If you see it there, click on Erase to erase all the data on the drive. This should restore it to factory settings and bring your drive back to life.
In either case, as noted, you will lose all your data. So hopefully, you’ve just been using your flash drive to back up the files on your computer and not to store original (i.e. only) copies of your documents, photos, music, etc.
Fortunately, the total failure of promotional USB flash drives is rare, so you may never have to resort to this type of flash drive CPR.