HELP!!! I have no idea what happened but when i started my pc the usb stick was constantly busy (saw the lights flashing non stop) and XP didn't recognize my usb stick. When inserted it on another usb port after a reboot it did "recognize" the stick but all data is gone. I get the message "the disk in drive F is not formatted. do you want to format it now?" I tried "handy recovery 2.0" and tried to analyze it but the error "no valid supported file system present on the volume"

I had a cheapie stick which did this regularly and I never did find out why. I binned it and bought a quality one (Lexar) and not had a problem since. Don't know if yours is a cheapie or not just letting you know it's not an unknown phenomenon. As for getting the data back lots of programmes about which claim to do this but in my experience results can be very hit and miss. Take your pick from here: http://www.downseek.com/directory/104.asp of Google for yourself. Moral of the story is NEVER trust irreplaceable date to a single medium. ALWAYS back it up elsewhere. Good luck

Are you using a new stick? did it have data on there before it wasn't readable? did your stick come with a driver cd? It might help to uninstall it, then re-install it before formatting it.

i bought it last year, warranty just expired a months ago. Never had problems with my stick, until last night. Also tested my stick on another pc, same result. it looks like it got formatted, but that's very strange cause i never did that and the LED was flashing after my xp was loaded. I thought it was strange and switched the stick to another port. Didn't recognize it first but after reboot i could check the contents of the stick. And from that moment i saw nothing on my stick and got that message it wasn't formatted.

Btw it's an Apacer usb stick 1.1, not an unknown brand i suppose. And XP don't require drivers. It recognize the stick automatically. The drivers i got were ment for win95/98.