I have a usb flash drive where I stored a ton of important files. The issue is few times when I connect it to my laptop, it would not recognize it. So I know there is some damage probably with it. I ...

A computer can recognize a second partition on a USB hard drive only if it can read the partition. If computer is unable to read the secondary partition, the partition may be in an unsupported format ...

For malware, just deleting the files or a quick format is sufficient. Your system will not attempt to recover those files unless you do something special. They'll just be gone and the memory is ...