Hello, 1st of all i'm using Win7 on a hp530 laptop. I got a problem with my USB flash drive, and the symptoms are exacly the ones you described. Problem is that the cause of the error is (i believe) in the flash drive, because it has worked before, but after my home computer got atacked by a virus the flash drive never worked again, it doesnt even work on any other computer (i tried my formatted winXP home pc, and a machintosh with unix based SO), i can connect other usb flash drives to my computer and they'll work fine, so i guess teh problem is not on the computer side. Main question is, is there any way i can restore the main structure of my pen drive so it can be recognizable again by the operating system?

Check in device manager wheter the disk is recognized as it should. Most USB stroage devices will be listed in "disk drives". If this is not the case, chances zre the device is physically damaged. There probably is not much to do about this. if it shows up, you should check disk mangement: here you should see the drive, but it can be there are no partitions (volumes) on the drive. If so, you can try to create them here. On succes your issue is resolved. If the drive does not show up in disk manager, it might (again) be physically damaged, or the existsing partition table is corrupt or unreadable for some reason (hidden?). In that case verify wheter you see the disks using diskpart ("list disk"), if diskpart list the disk, you can select the disk ("select disk *disknumber*") and clean it ("clean"). The it should show up again in disk manager and you can continue like above. If Diskpart does not show the disk, again it might be... damaged. In this particular case built-in windows tools will not be able to provide an easy solution. You still can try using a special format tool (like the HP USB format tool) or use for example the Gparted boot cd. Without any guarantee! Btw: be carefull when editing partitions, a mistake is easily made!MCP/MCSA/MCTS/MCITP

First of all thanks for the quick answer, Physical damage would be my last guess, because the flash disk never suffered any kind of collision, at lest not after the last time i saw it working, but... i dunno if some virus could cause the USB ports to output a higher voltage and that could damage the flash disk, appart from that i don't see any other physical damage that could possibly have happened, but i'm not a expert on this kind of matter... I tried HP USB format tool, i will try later on to make bootable gparted pen to see if its recognized there, i kinda doubt but... I was hoping it could be solved once it might have been caused by a virus, but... sometimes theres no other solution it excluding a physical repair, anyways i would like to try every single possibility to check if it could be solved by software repair. Once again thanks for the quick reply and have nice rest of day. PS: Sorry for some typos or spelling errors, my main language is not english.

Gparted did not detect the flash drive either, well... I guess it's a hopeless case, anyways if anyone hav more ideas to revive my usb stick feel free to shoot them away :) Thanks for the help and keep up the good work