Yesterday I bought a new USB stick from Intenso and moved a few files onto it. Suddenly the stick disappeared from the list of my devices. So I unplugged it and plugged it back in and now the drive is displayed, but only grayed out and when I try to open it, I get the error message: "Insert a disk into the USB drive."The error occurs on different USB ports and different PCs. Other USB sticks work perfectly. I have also tried to change the drive letter manually without success. If I try to repair the stick with
chkdsk /f g:
I only get the error message: "Volume cannot be opened for direct access."What else could I do? I urgently need the stick by tomorrow, but as today is Sunday, I can’t just exchange it in the store.
If you don’t need whatever is stored on the disk you can try using diskpart to clean it, which will remove all partitions on the selected disk. Then you can format and start fresh. In my experience, if cleaning a drive with diskpart doesn’t solve weird problems it’s usually dead.
How can I clean the stick with diskpart? Do you mean the way described in this article?
Yep, that’s the way. After I clean it I usually will format it in disk management instead of diskpart, but you shouldn’t have any problems if you follow that article.