So I have a flash drive that has a ton of my documents on it. All saved using a PC. I saved one Word document to it using a MAC. Then the next time I put it into a PC, the computer asks me if I want to format the drive! WTF! I clicked no and ejected the drive.

How can I get around this and access my documents on my PC? Any help would be deeply appreciated.

If you can read the USB drive in one or the other machines now, copy all the data off the drive.

The format the USB drive to exFAT file system.

Then it will work in both, and should stop being a PITA.

And you can copy all your data back on the USB drive.

Doesn't sound good...if it's prompting you to format, it is likely that some part of the file system has been corrupted.

I would, as suggested above, try to read it in another machine (maybe even a Mac, if possible), and if they issue persists, consider somebody that does data recovery.

I would go back to the Mac, copy the files off and then do as sigmonkey suggests.

Also, note that a USB thumb drive is not a permanent storage solution. It should never be the only copy of your data (aside from the fact that you should never ever only have one copy of your data on any storage media). USB thumb drives are for temporary storage and transport.

if popping it into the mac doesn't bring files back up for you to copy, see if you can run some recovery software on it.

usually when my flash drive goes bad, it just locks itself. i can still see everything on it to copy off but i can't save anything new to the drive.

i back up my flash drive once a week. this happens a bit. cheap microcenter flash drives, i guess.

Could be insufficient power on your USB connector.
Happens to me all the time.

Do not try to fix your drive until you have tried it in another or more computers.

USB connectors tend to fail with particular (large) flash drives. Try a second opinion first.

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