hacking USB flash drives w/ bad FATs

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doug-doug the mighty's picture
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hacking USB flash drives w/ bad FATs

I have a little USB flash drive that is supposed to be 64M. The thing is confused and identifies itself as being 0 bytes, thus failing all attempts to initialize in OS 9 ,OS X.4, and Windows 98. The drive is a USB 1.1 device.

I think the magical event that killed this thing was a bad format of the drive on a Windows XP machine, thus I suspect a gorked FAT.

Is there some handy little application out there that will:
1. interogate the device to allow better diagnostics?
2. run on one of the above mentioned OSes (not XP, that was not my machine)?

I realize that this is a bit of work for something so cheap, but it is a learning experience by design.

TIA
--DDTM

Jon
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I've got a 512MB that was sho

I've got a 512MB that was showing similar symptoms. It wasn't a bad format so much as failing hardware. I got it to mount one final time, and copied everything off of it, and it hasn't worked since. I'd say it's most likely borked if some of the regular formatting tools don't pick it up.

Yep, just spent a few minutes futzing with it. It did pop up once with the full size and R/W enabled. Trying a format resulted in an error, no partitioning, no mounting, etc... Sad

doug-doug the mighty's picture
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maybe... but...

...if I were to hand the device over to a federal authority and imply that the device had encrypted data critical to national security (not that there is or that I ever would), I am sure someone would find a way to get this thing up and running. Wink

Oh well, I figured it was worth a shot in asking. It makes for an interesting thing for me to explain to my son, who has started to show some interest in how computers work. Biggrin

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CF card

I have a 1gb flash card that when i first put it in my camera i was able to take 1000 or so pictures. there is a format option in the camera so i figured i would try it, it worked but made it so i could only take 500 or so pictures. i knew it had to be a format issues so i went through and tried a few different ones, but not all worked in the camera. finnally settled on Fat 32 and all was well again.

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Try formatting it in linux.

Try formatting it in linux. I've had good luck using linux to format old drives that os X wouldn't recognize.

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