[Solved] Flash Drive Showing Up As CD Drive Issue

USB flash drives are sometimes recognized as an empty optical disk (CD-ROM) drive and the data present on it becomes inaccessible. When you try to access such a drive, an error message pops up saying, ‘there is no disk in drive H: – Insert a disk and try again’. This occurs when the system recognizes the flash drive as an empty CD-ROM due to some internal drive issues.

This problem becomes critical when the flash drive contains important data. Also, this issue is not limited to USB flash drives as it can happen with any external drive whether it’s an HDD, SSD, or a memory card.

Nevertheless, repairing a flash drive that is detected as CD ROM is fairly easy. You can repair such drives by formatting them either by using “Disk Management tool” or “DISK PART” via Command Prompt in Windows OS. But the data stored on the drive is lost forever after formatting.

Therefore, if the USB flash drive contains important data that you can’t afford to lose, you need to first recover the trapped data from the inaccessible drive and then fix the drive or check the flash drive update.

In order to retrieve data from such inaccessible USB drive or when flash drive is not working, you need a professional and reliable data recovery tool such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Windows that comes from a trusted and renowned source – Stellar Data Recovery, and thus it’s completely safe and secure to use. This tool is capable of recovering data from an inaccessible, corrupted, formatted, reformatted, and deleted hard drive partitions with just a few clicks.

Step 1. Recovery of DATA

Follow the steps in the video below to recover your important data from a USB flash drive that is recognized as CD-ROM.

Once finished, check the recovered data and then proceed to STEP 2.

Step 2. Repairing the USB flash drive

After saving the recovered data, proceed to repair the USB flash drive that is recognized as CD-ROM using the following steps:

1. Keep the flash drive connected to the system.
2. Press ‘Windows + R’ and type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter to open the Disk Management tool.
3. Right-click on the USB drive that is recognized as CD-ROM and then select ‘Format…’
4. Enter Volume label, choose File System (NTFS/FAT32 etc.), and click ‘OK’ two times to format it. If you are still not able to access the drive, format again but this time uncheck ‘Quick Format’ and click ‘OK’ and for the second time ‘OK’ to confirm. Wait for a while as it takes time.
5. You can now access your USB flash drive from the File Explorer.

Also, you can move your recovered files to the repaired flash drive. Further, before moving the files, you can run CHKDSK utility to fix soft bad sectors present on the drive.

Conclusion

If you ever get caught in a similar situation, do not panic and never use any unreliable or untrusted tool to fix such issues. These untrusted tools can make the situation worse by corrupting the data. Schedule run CHKDSK on your drives – whether internal or external – to keep them free from disk errors. Also, run S.M.A.R.T. disk monitoring system to keep an eye on disk health.

Trusted and reliable tools like Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Windows are always available to help you in a situation of data disaster & drive corruption. The tool supports exFAT, FAT (FAT16 & FAT32), & NTFS formatted drives.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional software is a complete package to recover your data from any kind of storage media with an easy-to-use user interface.

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About The Author

Satyeshu Kumar

Satyeshu is a Windows blogger and data recovery expert. He is having good technical knowledge and experience in Windows data recovery. He writes about latest technical tips, Windows issues and tutorials.