USB flash drive not working or is appearing as an empty disk drive, Disk Management reports "No Media" with 0 bytes size

Failing Flash Drive

"No Media" means the flash memory controller cannot communicate with the NAND flash memory on the drive. Because of this, it appears to the computer as an empty disk drive. This is usually caused by the NAND flash failing. To the computer, the drive is not much different than a floppy or optical drive with no disk inserted.

As a result, it is not possible to access any data on the drive, nor is it possible to repartition or reformat the drive. Again, from the standpoint of the computer, there is no medium in the drive to be formatted or repartitioned.

Fake Drive?

It is also possible that the drive is fake and the cheap memory chip in the drive has failed. Drives failing in this manner will often show up as a storage device with 8MB capacity.

Potential Hardware-Specific Restoration

From this answer: You can obtain more information about the drive and its controller using a tool called ChipGenius. You might be able to recover the drive hardware by using a tool such as Bootice to manipulate the MBR.

Additionally, if the drive uses a Phison controller, you may be able to use the Phison USB Mass Production Tools to reprogram the controller and restore normal operation. Note that doing this will erase all data on the drive.

Data Recovery

In cases where stored information is merely corrupted, consumer data recovery software can often recover the contents. However, that won't work if the drive fails as described here.

There are data recovery services that can use special equipment to try to recover content from the chips. However, it is expensive. If you can't restore the drive to normal operation, it probably isn't worth sending it to a data recovery service unless the data stored on the drive is particularly valuable. You should simply replace the drive.


Go to MyComputer/Manage/USB Controller/USB Mass Storage/Unistall while plugged, then remove it, and re-plug in, the driver will -re-installed. It solved it on my computer.


This may happen also when there is insufficient power supply to the flash from the usb port. Check that you are not overloading the usb ports with power hungry peripheralas. Also tortured USB cables, if there are any connected, may sometimes leak current and reduce the available power.