These things don't work forever but I find people lose a lot of time over what is now a 10 to 20 buck thing.
Hello prospective helpers,
I have a 512mb SandDisk Cruzer Mini USB drive that used to work perfectly fine until recently. All of a sudden for no apparent reason my pc (XP SP2) is have trouble reading the usb drive and slows down the system in the process. When I tried to access the usb drive in command prompt, after about 3 minutes I got the following error message:
"The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted."
Then I went into "Device Manager" and saw the usb drive listed under "Disk Drives". Double clicking on it reveals that the "Device Status" is "This device is working properly." So I believe the drivers are not the problem but somehow volume is corrupted.
Bottom line, I have very important files stored only on this USB which I need to retrieve before throwing the USB drive away. I tried other USB drives on the same usb port and had no problems so it's not the usb port that has problems. I also tried my faulty USB drive on other pc's and they all had trouble reading it.
Thanks for any help.

Chowhound
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