It is very annoying when you connect your thumb drive to the system, but it does not show up. You unplug and plug it back again only to encounter the same problem again. Well, there are various reasons for thumb drive not been recognized by your system. It could be due to partition issues in the thumb drive, Windows driver issues, dead USB ports, etc.
So here we tell you few methods to troubleshoot the problem and make thumb drive show up on your system –
- Check in Disk Management
- Plug the thumb drive into the system
- Next bring up the Run window, type msc in it and hit Enter
- This will bring up the Disk Management window
- Here you should be able to see your thumb drive listed. Although you cannot see it in Windows Explorer, it should show up here.
If you can see thumb drive listed here, then you can proceed to format it so that it can be recognized. If thumb drive doesn’t show up, then continue with the next method.
- Fixing the issue
If thumb drive doesn’t show up on your computer, then there is a possibility of hardware issue. It could be a driver issue with Windows, USB port problem, or the thumb drive could just be dead.
- Unplug thumb drive from the USB port, and plug it into another port. If it works fine and gets recognized by the system, then the problem was with the USB port.
- If this is not the case, then try plugging thumb drive to another computer and see if it gets detected. If it doesn’t get recognized, then the thumb drive is probably dead. But if it works, then your computer may be having a driver problem.
Windows Driver issue can be fixed using Device Manager. Follow the method listed here:
- Bring up the Run window, type msc and press Enter
- Under Disk Drives option, check for any device with a yellow exclamation mark. If it is present, then you have a driver issue.
- Right click on the device name and select Update Driver Software
- Choose Search automatically for updated driver software, and follow the instructions to complete the process
After fixing the issue, and your thumb drive shows up in Disk Management, you have to restore data which has become inaccessible. For this purpose, you need a Windows Hard Drive Data Recovery software. The tool will efficiently get back all files from the undetectable thumb drive. Along with thumb drive, it also recovers data from the external hard drive, internal hard drive, memory card, pen drive, and so on.
Partition and format:
When data has been recovered from the thumb drive, the next step is to reformat the drive and partition. You need to do this to initialize the jump drive and to make it show up on your PC.
