My HP USB thumbdrive has become unreadable!

[Sossity]

I have been using an hp 16 gb thumb drive for school stuff, I tried to plug it into both a PC and a mac, & they cannot read it all of a sudden, they always have before.

it has gotten fairly full, but it is not completely full.

is there anyway I can get it to be readable again?

I had it labeled a s SCHOOL 1

when I inserted it, I was offered to format it in both windows & on the mac, as though it were a completely blank drive

[kpmedia]

The problem with flashed-based memory is that it can become corrupted easily when it fills up. That's one reason you're never supposed to leave long-term documents or photos on flash-based memory, be it memory cards in cameras or on thumb/flash drives. There's a good chance the data is corrupted. I run across this from time to time on a cheap USB stick here, and what I do is unplug it and try it on another computer. Plug it in slowly. Sometimes even try a USB1 slot, if available. It'll read slower, but at least it will read.

Don't format it.

This generally isn't something that software (with its magical promises) can fix. This is a hardware issue. You'll need to attempt insertion into multiple computers, until it works. Ideally, try to use the last computer where it was known to work fine.

Archive important data to both hard drive and optical media on a regular basis. If my computer crashed right now, I wouldn't really lose data -- just time to migrate from one of the backups. (And I'd be in a foul mood, as I hate wasting time on technology troubleshooting when I have work to do with it!)