Help me ressurect my dead USB stick! [LOCK PLEASE]

llamanator

Let's cut to the chase shall we?

I have a Kingston DataTraveler 8GB USB stick in my possesion that suddenly decided to stop working.

It's detected in windows and linux, but whenever you try to do anything with it in windows, it says : "Please insert disk in Drive E:". In linux, again, it's detected, but you can't mount it, it gives a similar error message to what you get in windows.

I'm not sure how I can get this drive working again, I don't care if I lose all the data on it, that's not important, and if it's really a completely dead drive with no hopes of ever coming back, then so be it. But it'd be nice if I can reuse it.

If you want to use Linux to fix it, then you'll have to give me very specific instructions as it's still pretty new to me, I'm running the latest version of Ubuntu (installed it yesterday). If you have any ideas in XP on how to fix it that would work too.

Thanks

Bowen

Flash disks are fickle things. You'll have to RMA it most likely. Try a checkdisk, but again, this is a common thing for flash disks and just outright dying. Once flash memory is dead, it's dead.

Camuai

bowen wrote: »

Flash disks are fickle things. You'll have to RMA it most likely. Try a checkdisk, but again, this is a common thing for flash disks and just outright dying. Once flash memory is dead, it's dead.

Don't forget they need some good lovin' too bowen.


But yea he is correct flash drives die really easy. And there's not a thing you can do about it.

Bowen

It needs more strudel.

Most flash disks come with a 5-year or lifetime warranty. Good ones anyways.

llamanator

Well, that sucks..

Oh well, I'll probably just buy another one, this one only cost me 20$

Thanks anyway guys.

jeepinryan

Did you try checking the flash disk for partitions? If you inadvertently destroyed the partition table (which can be easy to do in Linux on the command line if you're not careful), you may experience symptoms like you described. The Windows error in particular has happened to me on more than one occasion with a drive with no partitions or unformatted partitions.

To check for partitions and format if necessary, right click on My Computer and go to Manage. In the new window, expand the Storage option in the tree, and click Disk Management. It should show a list of all of your drives, with partitions and the filesystem (FAT32, NTFS, etc). If the flash disk shows up, just delete any partitions, recreate it and format it with FAT32 (so you can use it in Linux as well).