windows 7 - In accessible USB stick

A friend of mine had an assignment on a USB drive but it stopped working. On her computer the drive appears but when you go to the folder it says "inaccessible". I tried it on my computer and it appears to recognize the hardware but the drive never mounts. What can I try to recover the data? I hate to say it but the metal connector that actually goes into the USB port is slightly bent.

Hmm, if it's discovering the device but not mounting the drive, you may have a corrupted file system on the USB I'm afraid. This may or may not be fixable, depending on whether the flash memory is actually trashed. I'd first try to connect it to a few different computers/OS's to make sure that the mounting issue is not a local computer/driver problem.

Try PhotoRecfrom (it does more than photos despite its name).

Was this drive formatted for a mac? If so it is a file system windows does not recognize natively. Linux does FYI. Also if the connector is a bent you might have to discard (assuming this set of documents is not your life), however most damaged connections I've come across don't show up at all or "pop" in and out a lot.

If data on the USB stick are not needed, you could run 'diskmgmt.msc' and recreate partition table and filesystem on the stick. Just initialize the stick and make one big partition.

On the other hand, if that would be impossible (inactive commands in diskmgmt), you would have to zero first couple of megabytes of the pendrive (first sector should be enough) by a Linux or Cygwin. But remember to match the correct drive device (sdb, sdc or other).