Solved usb not working

[noel walker]

hi, and thanks for reading.

this may seem a bit long winded, but please bare with me.
i have been using a Kingston 16gb usb drive to share various music and video files with my family, without any problems.
the drive was working on my vista home premium desktop. also my wife's windows 7 laptop. and my sons windows 7 laptop.
it was also working on my android mini pc usb.
my son borrowed it last week to put some of his homework on it, when i put it in my pc usb port, it was not recognised, no sound on connection to pc, not showing on my computer, not showing in disk management, and not showing as unknown device.
i have tried some of my other usb flash drives in the same port and they are all working as normal.
when i tried the broken usb flash drive in my android mini pc port, i got the message "drive is not mounted".
this seems strange as the last place the drive was used/working was in my sons windows 7 laptop.
am at wits end trying to solve this.

thanks for any help
noel

 

[MilesAhead]

I would guess it's physically damaged. When they go bad it doesn't always take much. You pull it out of the port or have it in your pocket and sit on it, and the connections get disconnected. Some are more rugged than others. I favor those without any moving parts.

 

[noel walker]

I would guess it's physically damaged. When they go bad it doesn't always take much. You pull it out of the port or have it in your pocket and sit on it, and the connections get disconnected. Some are more rugged than others. I favor those without any moving parts.

yes i did have one that broke due to being of a quite cheap variety, but this one is fully enclosed in a metal body.
just had an idea, the flash drive was first used on my pc running vista home premium.
i used the safely remove hardware option, each time i removed the drive. but i know that my son who uses windows 7 on his laptop, just pulls the usb from his laptop as he says that windows 7 does not use the safely remove hardware option.
is there a chance that this might mess up the usb stick?

Noel

 

[MilesAhead]

I haven't owned a lot of usb sticks. So I can't tell you how rugged they are. But myself I go with the assumption that they can die at any time. Just because the outside shell is rugged does not mean the connectors inside survive. Also a kid is more likely to just yank the thing out. I'm not suggesting file system corruption due to failure to use "safely remove." I'm saying odds are the physical junction that was soldered at one time likely no longer is.

I just think of them as temporary storage. Like CD/DVD disks and floppies.

But others may have more experience to draw on than I.
(But that fact that you get nada on a bunch of different machines makes me think it's dead doornail.)

 

[wither 3]

I use a Kingston 16 Gb thumb drive to transfer files between my Vista Home Premium and Win 7 Pro systems. I don't do the safely remove hardware thing. I just unplug it from one system and plug it into the other. Never had a problem so I think the drive is damaged, as surmised above. The only question I have is- can the thumb drive be read on the Win 7 system?

 

[noel walker]

no the thumb drive cannot be read in windows 7

 

[wither 3]

In that case, I agree with the others. The drive appears to be damaged.