The computer makes the connection sound, a drive appears - and it holds nothing: 0 bytes, No Media, please insert a disk. This is a stranger failure than a format refusal, and it deserves a short, honest fix order instead of a long afternoon of false hope.
A pendrive has two parts that must both answer: the controller, which talks to the PC, and the flash memory, which holds your data. The No Media state means the controller is alive and introducing itself - but the memory behind it is not responding. Windows is quite literally shaking hands with an empty room. A few checks are still worth ten minutes; after that, honesty beats effort.
Right-click Start and open Disk Management. Find the removable disk. If it shows a size and a RAW or healthy partition, you have a different, friendlier problem - use the RAW guide instead. The No Media diagnosis is specific: the disk is listed as Removable with No Media and 0 bytes, and no partition exists to format. There is nothing to assign a letter to and nothing for diskpart to clean - the commands have no surface to work on.
A dirty connector or a starved hub port can produce a half-alive connection. If the drive shows No Media on two healthy PCs, the connection is innocent and you can stop swapping cables.
Open Device Manager, expand Disk drives and Universal Serial Bus controllers. If the pendrive appears with a warning mark, uninstall the device entry, unplug, and reconnect so Windows reloads its standard USB storage driver. This fixes a small minority of cases - usually after a Windows update tangle - and it is the last software step with any real chance. If the entry looks normal, the driver was never the problem.
Technicians sometimes revive No Media drives with chip-vendor utilities that rewrite the controller's firmware. Be clear about what that means: the tools are specific to one controller model, hard to identify without opening the drive or using chip-reading utilities, written for factories rather than users, and even when they work, the data is gone. For a cheap pendrive this is a hobby experiment, not a repair path - and never a data-recovery path.
After two computers, a clean connection and the driver reload, a drive still reporting No Media has a hardware failure: dead flash memory or a broken controller board. No format tool, registry edit or diskpart command can address memory that does not answer. Claim the warranty if the drive has one. If the data on it was irreplaceable, only a lab's chip-level recovery has any chance - at professional prices, with no promise attached.
The video shows the broader family of pendrive failures and fixes - useful context for telling No Media apart from fixable problems.
▶️ Watch Full VideoBecause part of it is not dead. The controller chip powers up and announces a USB device, which is what triggers the sound. The failure sits behind it, in the flash memory that never responds - so Windows shows a device with nothing in it.
No - and the failure is the information. Diskpart talks to the same controller; with no media answering, clean, create partition and format have nothing to act on. More commands cannot substitute for the missing hardware response.
A missing letter hides a healthy partition from Explorer, but Disk Management still shows its size and file system. No Media with 0 bytes is a different state entirely - there is no partition present to give a letter to.