Windows 10: My USB drive is asking to be formatted when I plug it in. Is there a way to access the data...

Every time I connect my USB drive to my computer, I'm met with a message asking me to format the drive before use. If anyone has encountered a similar situation or knows of a way to bypass the formatting prompt and retrieve the data safely, your advice would be invaluable. Please share any suggestions or steps I can take to access my files without formatting the USB drive.

:)

 

Accessing a Hard Drive...

...from a dead laptop.

My girlfriend's laptop recently s**t the bed, and she has a lot of photos she would like to retrieve from it. I used a USB to IDE cable to try, but it's a no go. Her drive has Windows XP Home on it, and my system has Win7 x64. The computer recognizes the drive, but it wants me to initialize it, which I think may format it.

I don't know if it's formatted FAT32 or NTFS. Are there any suggestions on accessing the drive to pull all this data off of it?

 

USB drive format

Just got a pair of 8gb usb drives. I've plugged em in and tried to format but it just comes up as "cannot format" ... any hints ... using win7 64 bit

 

help. USB drive isn't assigned a drive letter.

Any usb flash drive I plug into my computer isn't assigned a drive letter. The physical drive shows in the "safely remove hardware" but it doesnt show up in disk management. I have tried to populate the volume thru the safely remove hardware properties window and it does pop up in the list but it doesn't stay there. This isn't a format or assign a letter problem. It's more complicated then that. Maybe one of the services needed for usb drive management was disabled? Suggestions needed. btw external usb harddrives work fine.