Saturday, November 27, 2010

Transcend USB Drive Fix

I was given a 16GB USB flash drive today that wasn't working:

Symptoms
- When plugged in in XP it would show up in My Computer but when you click on it it would say 'Drive not initialized'
- Right click Format fails
- In XP Disk Management it does not show the drive size or allow you to initialize it
- When plugged into Windows 7 it appears in Disk Management but same as with XP you are unable to do anything but change drive letters and path
- when formatting from cmd you receive:
C:\Windows\system32>format j:

Insert new disk for drive J:
and press ENTER when ready...
Cannot open volume for direct access.

C:\Windows\system32>dir j:
The device is not ready.
Troubleshooting and Resolution
1.) I downloaded the HP USB Disk Key recovery application and found that when attempting to use this you get a:
C:\DriveKey>hpusbf j:

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, Version 1.00.012 (11/13/2003)
Copyright (c) 2003 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

The type of the current file system is RAW.

WARNING! ALL DATA ON THE DRIVE J: (Generic USB Flash Disk 7.76) WILL BE LOST!
Are you really sure that you want to proceed with Format (Y/N)? y

***ERROR*** IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_GEOMETRY: The device is not ready.

2.) Finally I went over to the Transcend website (the USB key was a 16GB V10 series Transcend drive) and downloaded their Online recovery tool (I don't know why they call it online -- it runs off-line)
- Using this tool I was able to run a "Repair drive & erase all
- This appears to have resolved the problem

Note: With flash drives there are a myriad of reasons that can break or stop working. The fix detailed above is only to fix the problem described by the symptoms above

1 comment:

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