Recently I came across a forum post in a prestigious forum site for Mac OS X users. The problem which forum thread stated was:

“The user had improperly ejected his flash drive from the Mac and now the system does not recognize the device after the flash drive is plugged in the USB port. The flash drive holds some valuable data which the user can’t afford to lose. He further asked for some immediate resolution to his problem.”

Reasons why the flash drive is not recognized by the Mac: A simple one-liner statement can explain why a Mac (or any other system) fails to recognize an improperly ejected flash drive. Whenever a flash drive is ejected in this manner the chances of driver files corruption are at the peak. This is the reason why ‘safe removal’ of any external device is recommended by computer experts.

But before finding a solution for unrecognized flash drives, let us consider three crucial cases that are helpful in a circumstance like this:

Solution 1: Launch Disk utility to see whether it still sees the device. Although the flash might not be mounted but the Mac system views it as an unformatted external device. However, if the device is not shown in the disk utility, then go to:

System Profiler<<Menu <<About This Mac<< More Info<<System Report <<USB

Use the device on some other computer system. In many cases, the flash drive shows up on the other system. If this happens, then flash drive has no fault.

Solution 2: Check the drivers of external storage device. An improper ejection might have corrupted the drive which now needs to be re-installed. Search the internet to look out for driver recovery software for that particular device. Many websites would provide the specific device drives for free. Just download them and fix the corrupted files of the external device.

Solution 3: If the above two solutions didn’t prove to be very helpful and data still needs to be recovered from the flash drive, then download a recovery software which supports Mac OS X data recovery from a USB device. Download the USB Mac file recovery tool from a trusted data recovery services and install on your Mac system. Launch the interface of the file recovery tool and check if the software is showing on your flash drive. The data recovery tools are somewhat capable of detecting a corrupted device, but they may also fail in case of severe corruption. However, if the device is located by the recovery tool, then select the device from the interface and launch scanning which will list up all recoverable files from the flash drive in the menu. Once the files are listed in front of you, you may select them for the recovery and finally save them on the system.