If your problem is that you’ve been using a USB stick successfully until recently, however when you now insert it you get a “’Please insert disc into drive” error, your flash stick is probably corrupt.

What most people don’t realize is that flash memory wears out and in fact research shows that a flash drive can wear out?’

The problem is that flash memory only has a limited number of ‘writes’ depending on the quality of the technology used in that flash drive it can actually last a very long time and when we talk about solid state drives now being used in computers but those are fairly expensive and also fairly high quality flash memory.

On the other hand, USB sticks that you and I might pick up commercially or even be given away, they are typically fairly inexpensive and they have a limited number of times you can write to them before they actually wear out so my suggestion to you is very fairly simple: since you can’t copy off the data, just get a new USB stick and be sure your USB stick is always backed up somewhere else because it may very well happen again depending on how often you write data to the USB flash memory.