What is wrong with my flashdrive?

Yeah unfortunately, with solid state memory, if it was ever inserted somewhere and quickly taken out it could’ve caused a corruption or crash. Either way, if it shows 8gb worth of memory, all your data is gone :/

Google reuva, its a great tool to recover files and its free. Also, BACK UP YOUR DATA I don’t get how poeple don’t do this, eespecially with thumb drives.

I’m sorry, but I think you’ve lost your data. This happened to my sister’s drive, she had almost filled it, but one day it went back to saying that it had 4GB of space available. Everything was gone.

Make sure you have backups of everything. Always back up your flashdrive, and consider backing up your hard drive regularly.

Wait a sec! the files might still be there even if the directory is trashed. And they might be recoverable.

Try cnet (download.com) for a file recovery program made for external drives.
I spent 35$ once for a program that got photos off a compact flash card that got messed up.
I don’t know what’s out there now to recommend but it’s worth looking.

In the meantime DO NOT put anything else on that drive as you could easily be rendering some old files unrecoverable.

if its a San Disk flash drive then you need to run the software that came with the flash drive, it will show up as 2 removable drives in ‘My Computer’, one will show the actual capacity, the other empty.

I think @XOIIO suggestion is good, recuva.