Every computer not recognizing my USB drive

[lkngro]

Hello all,

I recently discovered a big problem with one of my USB drives. Whenever I plug it into my computer (any port) or any other computer, it doesn't register as being there. There's no sound and when I go into My Computer, no external drive is recognized. I looked around all over the internet to try to diagnose the problem (including here), but to no avail. The only thing that I can think that happened to it was that I accidentally left it in my work computer (which also runs Windows 8) over the weekend. Someone may have turned it off over the weekend, but that's happened before and nothing went wrong the first time.

The drive is a 4GB PNY drive, and I run Windows 8. There's all sorts of data on it, Matlab scripts, images, audio files, motion capture files, etc. I'm working on a research project and I can't lose all my data.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Mattios]

How old is the drive? It may simply have died - they all will eventually.

The fact that it is not recognised at all anywhere points to it being dead.

 

[lkngro]

^ It's probably 3-4 years old. But I've had zero problems with it before yesterday.

 

[USAFRet]

They all work great, right up until when they die.

 

[junkeymonkey]

not to say it will help but find a computer running Linux and see -- I got some drives that get funny in windows but can be read under Linux and if so you may recover or transfer to a new known working drive ?? if you can recover to a new drive then use Linux to reformat the issue drive to fat 32 and then see if it will now read under windows

it a long shot but it may give a chance to recover ??

 

[andrewjcole]

What file system does it use? Can you find it by going to run > diskmgmt.msc?