A few weeks ago, I bought a Sandisk Cruzer 8GB flash drive. It's worked ever since a few days ago. I plug it in my computer, the light flashes slowly (normal behavior) while it's connecting to the computer. Then after a minute, it starts flashing like crazy. I go into My Computer, and there's a Removable Drive there, but no little progress bar showing how much memory is left (I'm on Windows 7), and when I try to access it, it's empty and Windows says it can't connect to the drive.
I cannot find a serial number anywhere on the flash drive.

It works fine on the school computers.

If anyone could help, that would be great. I need to use it tomorrow, so I either need to fix it tonight or get a new one.

If you can, back up everything off of it and reformat your flash drive. If that doesn't work, your computer's USB drivers might not be working correctly.

I can't do anything with it.

same thing happened to mine, did you happen to have any water damage done to it recently?

No, not at all. I just plugged it in one day and it did this.

Return it. Or buy a new one.

are you sure? There was absolutely no water contact at all that you can remember, or anything of the like?

Why else would ti work at school and not at home? It doesn't sound like damage to his thumb drive.

Ah, I missed that last part >< in that case, perhaps there is something wrong with that one USB port, or maybe there is something wrong with the drivers. I'm just throwing idea here `-`

Did you try reformating it throught diskpart in CMD? Also take it to another computer and try it. if it does not work then you definetly need to reformat. If diskpart in CMD does not work take it to a mac. I have never seen the disk utility fail. It is pretty good with repairing things.

Or, instead of using a Mac, use Linux and GParted.

Oh ya those too. I dont work with LInux very often so I did not think about it.

True, but more schools have Macs then Linux in my experience. My College had both Windows & Mac computers - depended on the classes being taught. My high school even had Windows & Macs.

Or, he could try to repair it on the computers at school under Windows, since it reads there. But none of that matters, since it reads normally at school. It's not his thumb drive, in my opinion.

Um, what?

Im with Comic. the only way it would be his flash drive is if the contacts are dirty from use and his computer's usb ports are worn down from use and not making enough contact (happened to me with one of my flash drives).

Yes, it's your thumb drive. But it's not your thumb drive that needs to be fixed. Since we were talking about "damages," not ownership, I figured the subject at hand would have defined the situation I was referring to.

GParted++ I would try using GParted, as souvik said.

By the way, is it only your flash drive that doesn't work?

Even if you don't normally use Linux, you could grab a different flash drive, burn Parted Magic onto it (live GParted never worked for me), boot that, and fix it from there.

It's not his flash drive.

After thinking for a bit, the only way it could be his flash drive is if the file system was imposed by the school computer (say, a Mac) as HFS+. But since HFS+ is mostly a Mac FS, that can only be confirmed if he plugged it in *and* formatted it under Mac.

Oh good point. What format is it? For anything portable, you should use FAT32. HFS (called Mac Journalled on a Mac) doesn't work on Windows, and NTFS half-works on a Mac (reading but no writing).