Rufus Damaged my USB. Windows can not detect USB

I was using Rufus (on Windows 8) to create a bootable Windows 7 USB installer but midway through I canceled it. Now my USB drive is not detected by Windows or Rufus.

Is it possible to fix this?

Edit: The USB drive shows up in Device Manager.

As the author of Rufus, I can tell you exactly what happened.

First of all, Rufus didn't damage your USB drive. It only removed the letter Windows assigned it, which it needs to do to be able to repartition and format it, and since you cancelled that operation, the drive letter was not assigned back. This is why you couldn't see it in Explorer, but you could still see it in Device Manager/Disk Manager.

The simple option, to make your drive listed again so that you could format it and get a letter reassigned, was to follow this entry from the Rufus FAQ. A couple of clicks in Rufus was all that was needed.

Also, the latest versions of Rufus has improved the default enumeration process and will automatically list raw or unpartitioned drives, so you should no longer have to do anything even if you cancel in the middle of a bad blocks check or a format operation.

I was able to fix the damaged USB by doing the following:

1. Go in Start > write “cmd” > right-click the Windows Command Prompt and choose to run it as an Administrator.
2. At the prompt, enter “DISKPART” to launch Microsoft’s disk management utility. It will take a second until it loads and when ready it will read “DISKPART>”.
3. Type in “list disk” to show a list of all disk drives. If your USB key is plugged into your PC, it should be listed here, along with other drives. Note the USB key’s disk number – you can pick it out by looking at the disk capacity.
4. Type “select disk n" (whatever is your USB disk number in place of "n").
5. Type “clean” for the utility to clean the disk, which DiskPart will confirm.
6. Create a new partition by entering “create partition primary”.
7. Choose this partition with “select partition 1", and then mark it as active by typing “active”.
8. Format the key by inputting “format fs=fat32". This should take a few minutes, and DiskPart will display a progress percentage.
9. Lastly, type “assign” to give this USB key a drive letter and “exit” to exit DiskPart.

From here: http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/218512-usb-flash-drive-not-recognized.html#post1831343

I did "DD" writing of linux ISO image in Rufus. It went well, linux boots from that USB stick. But windows does not show my usb disk anymore as drive.

But by Rufus it can be seen as "NO_LABEL (Disk 2) [16GB]". I just selected "boot section" dropdown menu to "not bootable", clicked "start" in Rufus. And voila my USB stick is now again recognized in windows :)

See screenshot.