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I have a Transcend 32GB USB disk-on-key with some fairly valuable data. No idea what happened, but now when I plug it in to any computer, I get a message that the drive is not formatted. Even if I try to scan the disk for errors, it insists that I format it first.

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Is there any way to fix the disk and recover the data?

Shaul Behr
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    Possible duplicate of [USB flash drive not working or is appearing as an empty disk drive, Disk Management reports "No Media" with 0 bytes size](http://superuser.com/questions/871850/usb-flash-drive-not-working-or-is-appearing-as-an-empty-disk-drive-disk-managem) – DavidPostill Dec 27 '16 at 17:06
  • @DavidPostill It's not the same question. The referenced question is about not recognizing the media. Here, Explorer is recognizing the media, but it thinks it's not formatted correctly. – Shaul Behr Dec 27 '16 at 18:18
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    Try it in another computer. Otherwise, your symptom may be different but the answer is the same. For some brands & some conditions, it may be possible to resuscitate the controller, but that destroys any existing data. You could try to reformat it, but that would wipe access to any existing data. As is, you can't access any existing data. Your only shot would be to reformat. If the drive is then usable (not guaranteed depending on why it appears unformatted now), you could try a low-level recovery tool to see if anything is salvageable. Lesson: flash drives aren't reliable; keep a backup. – fixer1234 Dec 27 '16 at 19:05
  • @fixer1234 Just what I told my daughter, who owns the drive, and has just learned her first painful lesson in backing up important data. :-p – Shaul Behr Dec 27 '16 at 19:08
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    Flash drives are among the least reliable of modern storage media. Add to that the possibility that they may be lost, stolen, or physically damaged. They should not be used as primary storage of important files but primarily as a transport media. All files of any importance should have at least one backup copy, 2 or more backup copies if the files are of particular importance. Recovery methods cannot be relied on. Professional recovery of flash drives is very expensive, even more so than for conventional drives. – LMiller7 Dec 27 '16 at 19:15
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    See http://superuser.com/a/854645/347380 for the golden rules :/ – Tetsujin Dec 28 '16 at 08:55

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