Thumb Drive Doesn't Show Up

Thanks, I have tested the drive on two other PCs and also tested someone else's drive on all three - they all worked but my thumb drive does not.

When I woke this morning the thumb drive showed under 'This PC' as 'F', but I couldn't open it and properties showed no data. I unplugged and plugged it in again and it doesn't show at all now, except in Disk Management (so I changed the drive letter to 'X') but still no luck.

It was showing messages saying it wasn't in the best of health, but after allowing Windows to 'fix it' I may have lost over 20 GB of data, most of which is backed up on my Windows laptop and HDD, thankfully.

I think the thumb drive is maybe three years old, but I rarely re-write anything on it, just use to store stuff (documents, lots of PPTs for teaching, a few videos, some songs) to be used mostly in class. Now I have to carry my precious HDD around and use it in lots of different PCs, which have been the subject of attacks via Hotmail recently - now Hotmail is banned from school computers.

I'll try to use the recovery tool.

Thanks, I have the data on another, second HDD and my laptop, plus I got a new thumb drive and put what's needed in the near future on there.

I'm wary of the cloud, firstly because I don't want to share with anyone who gets my login details, secondly I don't feel cloud tech has enough history to be considered reliable, thirdly because I don't want to rely on WiFi to access important data.

My new thumb drive is made by Kingston, which has less capacity for the same price as my old (one year old, not three) one, but hopefully will be more reliable.

Thanks again for your replies.