What if the Computer fails to recognize Thumb Drive

Flash drives, or Pen drives, are very handy & easy to use. Also, they work on any computer which has a USB slot. The thumb drives are available in various qualities, makes, prices and storage space that can go up to 128 GB which is more than enough to store the entire data of a hard drive but as said earlier, they are quite unreliable like CDs and you can not carry any important data or file in the thumb drive without having a backup of the same in the hard drive of your computer or a server. If you put in the flash drive in the USB slot of your computer and the system does not recognize it, there is a possibility that it has got damaged somehow and failed totally. Since almost all the external storage devices are plug and play devices, they should be recognized by the operating system automatically when connected to the computer. If the auto recognition does not happen, there may be some partition issue or conflict which is preventing it from being recognized. It could also happen due to the driver failure. In this case, you need to download and install the correct driver from the internet or you can avail online tech support to fix the problem.

You can use the following diagnostic methods to get the problem fixed.

• Right click on my computer, choose manage. Locate the flash drive under Disk Management, right-click & select change drive letter to change the drive letter from the existing one to a new one to avoid any conflict.
  
• If this trick doesn't work, reboot the computer keeping the flash drive inserted. This trick sometimes works and the restarted computer starts recognizing external devices.
  
• If the second trick also fails, change the USB port to confirm if the port is properly working. You should also unplug other USB devices to check if they are not interfering with the flash drive.
  
• Make sure the flash drive is formatted & properly partitioned. If it is not, you need to do it yourself by right clicking the drive and selecting the format option. Take a backup of all stored data before selecting this option.
  

The above mentioned steps should enable your computer to recognize the flash drive if it is not damaged physically. If there is a problem with the computer, a remote computer support can assist you in diagnosing the actual problem. All the USB devices need to be removed safely to avoid scratches. The proper way of removing USB devices is to remove them by clicking on the safely remove hardware option available on the system tray. Click on this icon, it will show all the connected USB devices. Select the device and click on remove. This will stop the device and you can safely unplug it.

You can also go to my computer, right click on the drive letter and choose Eject to remove it safely from the USB slot.

About the Author:
The author of this article has 5 years of Experience in computer IT support and business computer support.