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I have a USB flash drive (16GB Kingston DataTraveller 100 G3) that stopped working a few months ago. As far as I can remember, all I did was pull it out of the USB port without "safely removing" it. Since then, Windows 7 has refused to recognise it at all - it's not visible in Explorer, Disk Management or diskpart.

A few moments ago, it was recognised by way of a "Device has mulfunctioned" popup in the tray, after which it displayed in Device Manager as an Unknown Device. Right-clicking and uninstalling the device seems to have fixed the error message, and it's currently showing in Device Manager as a "USB Mass Storage Device", although still invisible to Explorer.

The really strange part, however, is that whenever this flash drive is inserted into the internal USB hub, any other USB device inserted into the hub after it also becomes unrecognisable. I've tested this with another flash drive and an iPhone charger. The moment the 100 G3 is removed, diskpart suddenly sees the other USB drive connected into the hub.

I considered a virus or some other form of malware, but I can't run a scan on a device that the system can't even see, and as far as I'm aware even running a full system scan won't solve that problem.

What's happened to my USB drive, and (how) can I bring it back to life?

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  • I have generally found Linux more tolerant than Windows of dodgy USB drives. Sometimes I have been able to get data off a drive unreadable in Windows. If you boot something like Ubuntu Live, you can try the Disks (gnome-disks) program to access and reformat it.
    – AFH
    Aug 12, 2017 at 19:52
  • See this article1 and article2.
    – Biswapriyo
    Aug 12, 2017 at 21:12
  • @Biswa, you've misunderstood the question. Please read it properly.
    – Hashim Aziz
    Aug 14, 2017 at 2:06
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    I don't know, but I suspect not: Cygwin is an overlay to Windows which I presume must ultimately use Windows drivers. It's possible you might be able to do it from a VM, but if it fails you won't know if it's a limitation of Linux or of the VM. Better to boot a Linux Live disc, so that you'll know that you have done all you can.
    – AFH
    Aug 14, 2017 at 11:29
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    If you dd the entire (smaller) disc, the larger one should then mount as if the smaller had been inserted. If this works, you can then reformat to its real size. There are probably parts that can be cloned without copying the entire disc, but I can't be sure what these are. Make sure you use conv=sync in the parameter list: otherwise, any source read error will make the target completely unusable, as the sectors will be offset after the error.
    – AFH
    Oct 19, 2017 at 9:23

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better quickly try to make a copy of the disk when it becomes recognized. sometimes when you shut down and restart your computer it recognizes it, try to make a complete copy of the disk using a free program that can create a twin of the raw data just in case it becomes more corrupted you might be able to recover files from a copy of the disk drive.

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  • also try to use the chkdsk ability and using the f/ for fix, windows will attempt to recover any corrupted files and store them on that drive in a "FOUND.00001 folder.. there are also many free program,
    – ritenhouse
    Aug 12, 2017 at 19:57
  • Welcome to Super User! Please take a moment to review the help center (superuser.com/help) if you haven't already done so. You may also wish to review How do I write a good answer?(superuser.com/help/how-to-answer). As a small suggestion, you should probably edit your answer to include your comment, since this seems to be of use to the OP.
    – Anaksunaman
    Aug 12, 2017 at 22:24
  • Data loss isn't really an issue here, it's a new USB that I didn't get the chance to transfer anything to.
    – Hashim Aziz
    Aug 15, 2017 at 23:53
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I finally managed to solve this issue, just as I was ready to chuck out what I thought was a dead flash drive. After testing the drive on two more Windows machines and having it display without issue, I realised that the issue was confined to my machine itself, not the flash drive. This led me to look to the Registry, being the only place I know of on the Windows operating system that logs and stores information on all the USB devices that are inserted into the system.

Some more research brought up several specific registry keys for this purpose, which are usually made use of for forensic purposes. A comprehensive list of these registry keys can be seen here.

Instead of hunting down and deleting these registry keys manually, I downloaded USB Oblivion, a portable utility which removes all registry keys associated to USB devices. While this method is somewhat overkill as a solution to this particular problem, I was unable to find an alternative program that allows you to delete the registry keys for only a specified USB device - and in any case, I could trust the drivers for all other USB devices to install without issue once reinserted.

I ran USB Oblivion, first in simulation mode and then properly, before reinserting the flash drive and finding that it was recognised immediately. I had no indication at any point before or after the flash drive ceased working that a driver might have been responsible for the issue, especially after several attempts to reinstall drivers had yielded no results.

I still have no explanation for why the flash drive prevented the computer from booting up when it was inserted, but I think it's safe to conclude that the system's device-specific registry keys were forcing the device to use a driver that had become corrupted, and that cleaning these registry keys allowed a fresh version of the driver to be reinstalled and associated to the drive.

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I have lots of experience dealing with broken USB flash memory devices under Linux.

I had drives that prevented my system from powering down until I removed it. These also prevented my system form getting past BIOS POST screen. It could stay there forever until I removed the faulty drives.

I had drives that prevented any other drives from working also. For example: I have 3 10-port hubs connected, there's 30 drives in them, all are flashing LEDs as I'm conducting automated tests. After a while I walk buy that workstation and nothing is working. All the drives stopped flashing, my software shows no activity - apart from one drive that's flashing it's LED. Once I plug that drive off - everything comes back to life.

This is very frequent with cheap, low-quality flash memory modules from China.

I guess some of the drives are broken in such a way that they bog down an entire USB controller, making all other drives wait forever. I guess this also can cause BIOS POST tests to hang forever.

I have no idea how Registry Cleanup fixed it for you - maybe it's an entirely different problem. I'd sure not expect genuine Kingston memory to do that. If you have a noname on your hands - be cautious (also don't expect it to retain any important data - best test it with F3 or H2testw before using it at all).

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