Recovering an old USB drive?

[addestroyer]

I have this old USB drive that folds flat and fits in my wallet and I've carried it around for years. I tried to use it a couple days ago with a printer and the only thing I could get from it was that it couldn't read the device. I assumed that despite going to an engineering school, they either set up the printer wrong or just configured it so that it wouldn't read USB drives. But I finally got around to checking it on my computer and, well, it's messed up.

It shows up as a drive, but is all grayed out and basically acts like an empty CD drive. Properties shows that it's working correctly, but that it has 0 bytes of storage. Attempting to format it just says "Please insert a drive". I tried reading it from Ubuntu in WSL, but it refuses to mount, probably because it still goes through the Windows API?

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone here might have any ideas on how to recover any data on it, or in general restore it to some semblance of functionality.

I do have access to a real Linux install, I would just have to close waaaaayyy too many things on my laptop to get to it, so I haven't tried anything with that yet.

[Helios]

If the drive can't mount in Windows, no recovery tools in Windows will be able to touch it.

You can check if your flash drives partition is getting a drive letter assigned. Otherwise your only remote shot is firing up Testdisk in Linux

[addestroyer]

Well, finally got around to checking with Testdisk, and it didn't even detect it, so that's kind of a bummer.

Thanks for the suggestion, it's nice to know that a program like Testdisk is around if I ever need it!

[DacoTaco]

from the description i fear the memory chip inside the usb is dead :/

[addestroyer]

I kinda figured there was some dead hardware, but I thought that maybe since it still showed as a valid drive, there was some hope. I didn't think to consider that there would probably be a separate memory chip and USB interface chip, which would explain how it still shows up even though it's dead

Kinda sucks because I did have some stuff on there that I was hoping to keep around :/ Guess this is another reason to get into more of a habit of backing my stuff up