pendrive is appearing and disappearing

Question

My pendrive is recognized on every computer but it will appear and after some time will disappear causing windows to show a FAT32 error.

In Windows XP it says that the hardware is damaged. This happens within 2-3 seconds so I'm not able to format it.

In XP the properties for it shows zero space and in windows 7 it properly shows the disk space.

I don't know what exactly happened to it because I gave it to my friend and since then these issues are happening.

Solution

I have seen USB ports on some laptops that have sensitive connections. If the plug is jostled or wiggled it can often interrupt the connection. Best rule for me is: plug the USB drive in and don't touch the plug or move the cable till the job is done.

Comments

[Breakthrough]

It's possible that the USB key is corrupted (flash memory does have a finite number of write cycles), or the filesystem itself is corrupted. What did your friend happen to do with the key, and what OS was he/she using?

[Blaine]

I had this happen to one of my flash drives that's coming up on 10 years old. By this point I believe it is just at it's end of life.

[Ishan Srivastava]

I know this is super late but by any chance are you using a VM? if vm settings are set to use the plugged in device on the VM and not on the host machine it would happen just as you are foretelling your problem

[LPChip]

OP States it happens cross-pc, so this is not a pc issue.