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Flash drive ruined?

Aneisch

Aneisch

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 9, 2009
24
0
Hey guys, last ditch effort, I pulled out my 32 GB flash drive while deleting some files (finder stopped responding) (not my smartest idea).

Anyways, now when I plug it in, I get the "The disk you inserted was not recognized.. etc" message, and when I click initialize and open disk utility, it is seen a an partitioned raw formatted 8MB disk. How is this possible? I can't partition or repair.. nothing I have tried has worked. :mad:

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Aneisch
 
Aneisch said:
Hey guys, last ditch effort, I pulled out my 32 GB flash drive while deleting some files (finder stopped responding) (not my smartest idea).

Anyways, now when I plug it in, I get the "The disk you inserted was not recognized.. etc" message, and when I click initialize and open disk utility, it is seen a an partitioned raw formatted 8MB disk. How is this possible? I can't partition or repair.. nothing I have tried has worked. :mad:

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Aneisch
Click to expand...

Borrow some time on a PC and see if it'll recognize/format it.
 
What happens if you reformat it as an 8MB drive? I suppose you've accepted all the data is gone, so it's worth a try.

If Disk Utility can see it, then programs like Disk Warrier etc should also work. They don't rely on a drive being able to mount.
 
RedTomato said:
What happens if you reformat it as an 8MB drive? I suppose you've accepted all the data is gone, so it's worth a try.

If Disk Utility can see it, then programs like Disk Warrier etc should also work. They don't rely on a drive being able to mount.
Click to expand...

When I try to format the drive, it fails "Mediakit reports bad partition or no map found"

Disk warrior says no disks are available..
 
If it's 32GB it might be quite new, so still under warranty. Send it back and get a replacement.

I have a 320GB laptop HDD that died at 18 months into a 2 year warranty, and I really need to get round to sending it back.
 
Aneisch said:
Are you telling me that a $20.00 32 GB flash drive could have been an indication of the quality?
Click to expand...

The funny thing about flash drives are that a $1000 solid gold 32GB flash drive does the same job as a $20 32GB flash drive made from cheese!!
 
What if you click on the drive itself in disk utility, click the partition button, then select "1 partition" from the drop-down list, then click "options" below the partition info and select MBR or GUID (depending on your needs)?
 
Aneisch,

You need to do a Low Level Format of the drive in Windows.

When you pulled it out while it was deleting files, the File Allocation Tables got screwed up.

RedAntArmy
 
RedAntArmy said:
Aneisch,

You need to do a Low Level Format of the drive in Windows.

When you pulled it out while it was deleting files, the File Allocation Tables got screwed up.

RedAntArmy
Click to expand...

Edit: Got the low-level format tool, but received an error ""this device cannot be accessed because it is less than 65335 sectors" when I tried to run the format.
 
Was working on a lady's hard drive last week, and the first time I got it to mount it reported as an 8MB drive (320GB or so). Never seen that before.

Because the drive was only mostly dead, i eventually got lucky after a few tricks and got the drive to mount one last time.

It very unlikely that a problem like that isn't able to be formatted away (at least, what you did to cause the problem under normal circumstances), but it seems that it fried the drive somehow with how it is currently mounting.
 
not sure if your situation is the same as mine but i had the same problem a couple days ago...except mine stemmed from trying to delete a linux installation. anyways, this was how i reformatted mine.

- borrow a Windows computer from someone
- run command prompt as administrator (right click the command prompt program and you'll see the option)

type the following once the command prompt program is running:

diskpart

list disk (find the number corresponding to your USB...mine was 1)

select disk 1 (or whatever number your USB drive has been assigned)

clean (this command cleans everything, including hidden/messed up partitions)

create partition primary

select partition 1 (this number is the number of partitions you want...NOT your USB number)

active

format fs=NTFS (after you run this command the program will start counting from 1 to 100...wait till it's done counting before going on)

assign

exit

now your USB drive is formatted to NTFS. plug it back into your Mac and run disk utility to re-format it to whatever you want or just leave it as is. theoretically you should be good to go after the clean command but for whatever reason it didn't work that way on mine so i had to go all the way.

there's a way to do the exact same thing from a Mac through Terminal but the linux commands were a little too foreign for me to grasp. didn't want to risk screwing up my HD instead of my USB drive.
 
benzslrpee said:
select disk 1 (or whatever number your USB drive has been assigned)...
Click to expand...

Thank you benzslrpee, sounded promising, but diskpart doesn't recognize it; it doesn't show up under list disk.

Oh well, I bought me a 64 GB Kingston Data Traveler :)

I'd still like to fix this one if anyone's got an idea..



Edit: benzslrpee, diskpart does list my flash drive.. but under volumes, any suggestions?
 
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