Hello guys, This incident makes me want to cry.. I have this Flash drive, I have put plenty data in it. I have the virtual operating system it - prayaya. and I have installed plenty of programs on the virtual OS.. even dream weaver cs5 and flash proffessional that took me all most 2 days to install cos instalation on the PRAYAYA is slow. now at 90% of flash inst. the disk is telin me "The disk is not formated, do I want to format it" I felt like cryin..Please, my question goes _ is there a way of stopin this popup so I dont get to format it anymore and loose all the data in it. this is so awful.. Also what are ways of protecting ur flash to avoid this msg in future and precautionary measures in terms of handling and operating a flash drive..

hi kaycee,

do not format the flash drive until you've tried the possible recovery options:

1 try to plug the flash drive on a different computer (best if you can try it on a MAC), and see if it can detect the files inside

2. if step 1 and plugging it into a mac or linux system still fails, try running recuva.

3. try using "GetDataBack"
Data Recovery Software Products - Runtime Software Products

your flash drive is probably formatted as FAT32, download the Fat32 version of getdataback. the download install a demo version. Based from the website, the demo is able to detect and preview the files that it can recover. If it is indeed able to see the files, you can purchase a license so you can proceed with file recovery.

***there might be other software (we can try looking for other and possible free software in case steps 2 and 3 fail). sorry i havent personally tried using prayaya yet, so im not sure how the data was saved.

one thing i can tell you is that, its best to properly remove the flash drive first instead of just shutting down the computer or pulling it from the usb port.

also, large files like 300mb++ exe or documents take some time for the antivirus to scan/ takes some time to edit and save. you'll know that programs are no longer accessing your flash drive when its says its safe to remove the drive from the start menu.

thanks a lot for those words.. but I can't bet, there are times when I shut down the system before removing my flash drives because they won't "eject safely". at times, I try to eject it but it keeps tellin me there are programs using the disk and there are really no programs using the disk... so inorder to avoid forcefully pulling it out from the pc, I simply shut down and remove them.not knowin that is also a wrong practice...

Please what can I do to eject it safely when it tells me there are programs accessing the flash drive and when am sure there are no programs on or runnig from the flash...

I'm not actually after recoverin the data on flash. but am after how to prevent that frequent prompt to format a flash drive when I've been using it for long..

it's really anoying.. thanks