A friend of mine has this problem with her pen drive. It seems like her pen drive is now undetectable. She tried with many computers, but it still didn't work. I tried google for it, but there's no explaination about undetectable pen drive. All i could fin is how to recover files from it.

Tbh, i think her pen drive is bleeped up. But who knows, maybe you people has other idea.

So, any idea?

I'm inclined to agree with you, ibmoisin, though it's unusual for flash memory to "die" unless it's poor quality and the thumb drive is some obscure make. Having already tried it on several PCs there's not much else to be done.

My sympathy if anything really important was on it. I just want to suggest your friend buys a good quality replacement such as Verbatim or a Lexar.

Yeah, i guess so. Thanks for the reply anyway.

Can winodows even see it? If it can, you can try to reformat the drive (it will delete everything that's on the card) in hopes that it will help to fix it. Was there any installation software that came with it?

No, it's not detected at all. And i don't think it came with a software.

Do you know what computers she has tried it in? WinME/2k/XP don't need drivers but Win98 does.

Some shady flash drive makes actually use ROM chips, these chips die after only a few read/write sessions. How long has she had the drive? If it's reletively new, have her return it to the store for a refund.

What about to reboot when it is still connected?

Try to find out if it came with software. Some (very few) drives are "secure", meaning that you need software to be able to read/write from/to it. I've only run into this once though, but I couldn't do anything with the drive because I didn't have the software.

If all else fails (as it seems to have) I'd follow Amazing Andrew's advice and return it for a refund (not an exchange if possible).