windows - Did my USB Drive just die?

08
2014-07
  • Abdullah Gheith

    I have a 32 gb usb stick. I was in mac (vmware) putting some stuff on. Then accidently removed the drive. I put it back in, and wanted to format it. Using disk utility, i choose 1 partition, it automatically filled in 312 GB and i just clicked format or whatever. It didnt take long the i could the the progress bar hanging at "Waiting for device to reconnect". Nothing happend for a while so i ejected it. Now comes the problem..

    In Disk Utility (Mac): No sign of usb drive.

    In Paragon Partition Manager (Windows): No sign of the usb drive.

    In Disk Manager (Windows): I can see that it's there. But it says: Disk 1 Removable (D:) No Media. When i right click it, i can only assign it drive letters. No way to format.

    In diskpart (Windows): diskpart list will show me the following: Disk 1, Status: No Media, Total Size: 0 B. When i eject the drive, the disk 1 will disappear. So i know that it's this drive. If i type clean, it will say that "There is no media in the device".

    In HDD Low Level Format Tool 4.25 (Windows): Doesn't detect it at all.

    In Device Manager (Windows): It is detected as USB Mass Storage Device.

    In Gparted (Linux): Doesn't detect it.

    In HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool 2.1.8 (Windows): It detects device as: "GENERIC USB Mass Storage 1.00 (0 MB) (D:)". When i press Start it gives me this error: "There is no media in the specified device"

    In BIOS: Detected

    In Spinrite (Live Boot): Doesnt detect it

    Any help is appreciated..

    • Answers
  • Ilan Biala

    I've had lots of success with HP's usb tools when I have bricked my USB drive.

    Try this link.

    Hm, if this didn't work, I may have given you the wrong link as the tool I used to recover multiple dead flash drives with the same problems was a few years old, I'll try to find the right one.

  • Julian Knight

    You seem to have exhausted the free tools and the only thing I can suggest if the drive is important is to try Spinrite though it is quite expensive, it often works where others utilities fail. It regularly recovers drives that seem beyond hope. It will work on USB disks as long as you BIOS supports them.

    Honestly though, I think that it's a write-off. I have one that is dead too.

  • Unnikrishnan

    Please try using Partition Wizard

    If the drive is showing on it, delete the existing partition and create a new one. Hope it will work.

  • user1147688

    I'm quite convinced you completely borked your USB drive. After all, a USB pen-drive is little more than an SD card. Given how terrible QA testing they have on those devices, it would be interesting to know what exact brand and model you used? Finally, there must be a good reason why you need to enter the size when formatting...

    If there is something of extreme value on that stick, you could try to interface directly with FTL by trying to find a serial line on the chip or nearby. Perhaps you could flash a new FW to it?

  • pbies

    If the drive is visible under *nix like systems in /dev folder, I would try to zero it by dd or pv. Then try to make it usable (create partition). Sometimes it help.


    • Related Question

    windows - Partitioning a bootable Flash drive
  • mmc

    Is it possible to have a 2 partition Flash drive that looks like the following:

    • A partition that is bootable to OS X (this will require a GUID partition table)
    • A second partition formatted either FAT32 or NTFS that is readable on both OS X and various flavors of Windows

    I have set up a disk using Disk Utility on the Mac, and it boots fine with a second FAT32 partition... but Windows does not see it. Any flavor of Windows wants to format the entire drive.

    Has anyone done this, and if so, can you explain the steps you followed?

    EDIT: Making it bootable is no problem. I have that. I'm wondering how to make the second partition on a Flash drive visible to Windows. It's possible that the "second partition" is the problem, and I need Windows to be first, and HFS to be second. I'll try that tonight.


    • Related Answers
  • Chris Nava

    Unfortunately, the windows accessable partition must be the first partition on a thumb drive or windows will not mount it. Linux installs can get around this limitation by putting the bootloader configuration files on the windows partition and everything else on the second partition. I'm not sure if you can do this with Mac though. My Mac is to old to try (as it is PPC based.)

  • mcandre

    The Geniuses at the Apple stores use external USB drives that boot to Mac OS X. So it's possible.

    iHackintosh shows you how. rEFIt helps to make drives bootable for Mac and Windows. You'll need something like it in order to keep the two partition managers (Mac and Windows/Linux) in sync.