Old 4GB Cruzers crash computer

I’ve got a bunch of files from previous computers saved on 4GB Cruzers, two of which are now unusable.

One of them immediately crashes the computer and I have to reboot.

The other one now goes into BSD as soon as I plug it in and the computer emits a tone. Windows then goes through some info gathering before it reboots on its own and the tone stops.

The first one is more severe but they’re both now unusable and I can’t access the files anymore. Is there any hope to ever recovering the files?

Windows 10. Other USB drives work fine. Using a different USB port doesn’t have an effect.

Try a live Linux system.  Maybe it will see the files on the drive/s and let you copy them. 

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Can the machine boot with the drive plugged in? If so then You can go into disk manager and unassign the drive letter. That will allow you to scan and fix errors on the drive from within diskmanager.  Hope you get your files.

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I can boot up with the drive plugged in, but it doesn’t recognize that anything’s plugged in. All it sees is the C:\ drive.

With the machine booted and the Cruzer plugged in does it show in Device Manager?

With the machine booted up, if I plug in the Cruzer it crashes the computer. That’s the original problem. Can’t get there from here…

Yes, we know that is the problem so let me rephrase the question:

With the Cruzer plugged in and you boot the machine does the Cruzer then show in Device Manager?

Sorry for the delay. Vacations and other distractions…

As for booting up with the drive plugged in, one of them will boot up but won’t show up anywhere. The other one won’t let the machine boot up but goes into the blue screen with “PC ran into a problem…” error. I have to pull it back out to let it complete a successful reboot.

It’s possible the drives are broken at this point.  Whether they are covered by the RMA I don’t know.  Try it and see what happens.

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5232/~/return-material-authorization-(rma)-process