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Somehow my USB flash drive is broken. When I plug it into my Windows 7 PC it appears in Windows Explorer, but I cannot format/access it; I get the "insert disk" message every time I try to access/format the drive.

What can I do to get it working again?

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Since you didn't provide any details about the drive it's hard to provide any detailed steps to help you. The fallback thing to do is try it on a different machine - Windows and something else, too. Sometimes Mac or Linux machines might be able to see it.
If they don't recognize it, you're probably out of luck. There may be a specific utility for your flash drive that might help.
In my experience though, a dead USB stick is dead. It's not even worth the shipping to RMA it unless it's a very pricey model.

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  • There aren't much details, the drive is just recognized as "Generic USB Flash Disk USB Device". It has 4GB, I got it as a giveaway.
    – Max
    Oct 8, 2013 at 16:29
  • Fair enough. It was free so no big loss to you. However try this utility SD Formatter. Also, if you can see the drive in your BIOS there is hope, so you may want to check that out first.
    – valsidalv
    Oct 8, 2013 at 16:38
  • Thank you for the suggestions. I tried both of them, it neither shows up in my BIOS nor in SD Fomatter. Apparently I have to ditch the drive :(
    – Max
    Oct 8, 2013 at 16:56

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