What does it mean when you stick your data stick into the computer and the computer asks ?

"The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" And you know you have a lifetime of data and information on the data stick. And your stomach is starting to go in knots. Should I be thinking of jumping out the 17th storey window because my data is now lost?What does it mean when you stick your data stick into the computer and the computer asks ?
It means your PC can't read your usb stick.

Either,

the File Allocation Table on your USB stick is corrupted

or

The USB stick has been formatted as HPFS, ext3 or something else exotic that windows can't read. (Try your stick on a PC running Linux)



If it's caused by the first reason:

Don't jump there is a solution.

View the source belowWhat does it mean when you stick your data stick into the computer and the computer asks ?
Take it to another computer and see if other computer will read it. Even... another OS like MAC OS.



Don't laugh...I've seen this before. It's worth a try.



You can boot into recovery mode using your install cd and run chkdsk on the data stick as well to see if it can be recovered.



For future reference, the only way to remove the data stick from a computer is to eject it first. If you pull the stick out without ejecting it, you run the risk of corrupting the stick. Right click on it and eject it.What does it mean when you stick your data stick into the computer and the computer asks ?
Try it on a different computer.

If it doesn't work there you have probably corrupted the data. That often happens if you just remove the USB stick instead of explicitly unmounting it by right clicking on the drive name and unmounting it so that all data is written to it before you remove it.



If you really have lost the data you should google for a data recovery tool because it is quite possible you'll be able to recover some of it.



USB sticks are not great for archiving data. You should either burn a CD/DVD at the slowest possible speed, or backup your data to an external hard drive.