Is my USB device bad or what?

[teamdaddy]

Hi folks. Non computer guy here needing help. I've got an old R31 that has up until now worked perfectly. What happened is this, I saved some information from another computer with VISTA Home basic to my jump drive and when I plugged it into the R31 (XPPro), it recognized the drive and everything but I couldn't find anything on the jump drive. It was completely blank. I asked my daughter to plug it into her computer to see if she saw the information and it was blank on hers as well. I was just wondering if it might be my USB device which is going bad or what? Any help would be much appreciated.
NOn-computer guy.

[mgo]

Hi folks. Non computer guy here needing help. I've got an old R31 that has up until now worked perfectly. What happened is this, I saved some information from another computer with VISTA Home basic to my jump drive and when I plugged it into the R31 (XPPro), it recognized the drive and everything but I couldn't find anything on the jump drive. It was completely blank. I asked my daughter to plug it into her computer to see if she saw the information and it was blank on hers as well. I was just wondering if it might be my USB device which is going bad or what? Any help would be much appreciated.
NOn-computer guy.

Have you used this drive before? Did it work?

I would suggest you try a simple troubleshooting step first off. Just copy one small text file over to the USB drive and then without unplugging it, see if you can read that file off the USB drive. If so, then the drive is likely working.

If you cannot read the file that you copied, right click on the drive and left click Properties and see if it is formatted in FAT32 or NTFS. If not, the drive needs to be formatted before it can be used.

Also remember, before unplugging the drive, you need to do the Safely Remove action to preserve the data before it is unplugged.

[teamdaddy]

Well, I did everything you said and it worked fine this time??? I don't know if it was just a fluke or what. More likely "Operator Headspace". Thanks for your help.