Bit OT. Flash drive problem ...

Standard question #1: Make, model, and capacity please?

Have you checked to make sure it's not a counterfeit?

The usual problem is not the SD card. It's the tiny switch in the SD card receptacle. I have an SD card that doesn't quite hit the switch on some readers but works on others. Tolerance problem.

Here's how to do it with an Xbox 360:

It works.

I also had a micro-SD that claimed it was write protected. None of my PC's or Mac's would format or fix it. So, I crammed it into my Droid cell phone, and formatted it in the phone. No problem.

Incidentally, you might be interested in these SD speed test results:

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# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
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Also try this formatter:

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Colin

On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 02:30:54 +0100, "Arfa Daily" put finger to keyboard and composed:

I'm no guru, but ISTM that your flash drive may have reached the end of its life. I think the failure mechanism may be something like the following.

When data are written to a cell, the original contents first need to be erased, they cannot just be overwritten. Since data are written in whole blocks rather than individual LBAs (aka sectors), the original block is copied to a new location and the pointers are then updated so that the LBAs now map to the new block. The old block can then be reused at a later date. That's how wear levelling works.

AIUI, USB flash drives and SSDs are "over-provisioned" with additional storage space to accommodate spare sectors, etc. It could be that your flash drive has now exhausted its over-provisioned space, in which case there are no spare sectors to receive your new data. That could be why the drive is reporting that it is "write protected".

Note that "erasing" files or formatting the drive still requires that the original data be copied to a new location. SSDs can be erased using the ATA Secure Erase command, but AIUI there is no similar command for USB mass storage devices. The latter use a SCSI-like command set. The Secure Erase command is performed internally by an SSD or HDD -- it does not require the OS to write zeros to every sector over the SATA/PATA interface.

BTW, which "little software utility" have you tried?

- Franc Zabkar

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We seem to be at slight cross-purposes here, Jeff. It's not an SD or CF card. Its a normal USB 'dongle-type' flash drive. This particular one happens to be shaped like a rifle bullet. The tip screws off to reveal the USB connector. I guess that it might contain the same memory hardware as an SD or CF card behind the USB interface which it obviously has, but I don't know for sure. Some of these flash drives do have a little physical switch for write protecting, but many don't. Mine is one such. Capacity is 16GB as stated in the original post. It is still correctly identified as a 16GB flash drive by Windows. Make and model are irrelevant. It doesn't have either. It's just a typical Chinese memory stick in a novelty bullet shape.

Arfa

Thanks for that explanation. I guess it's a possibility. The utility I tried is called "Repair_v2.9.1.1.exe'

I downloaded it from a website after Googling on "Flash drive says it is write protected". Many of the hits that returned made reference to this utility, and provided a link to the URL where it is to be found. Almost everybody reported total success from using it, but there were a few cases like mine, where it didn't work.

I guess I'm just going to have to buy a new one. They are not expensive. It's just annoying to be beaten by something as simple as a corrupted file structure. It has been suggested to me that there are Linux ways of forcing a reformat, so I might have a mate of mine who is into Linux give it a go as a last ditch attempt.

Arfa

On Sat, 23 Jun 2012 02:35:13 +0100, "Arfa Daily" put finger to keyboard and composed:

FWIW, this site appears to have a more recent version:

ISTM that this utility performs a low level format. Exactly what this means in this particular case is unclear. I suspect it may just be a zero-fill utility.

AFAICS, if it were simply a case of a corrupted file structure, then you still would have been able to wipe the drive.

Instead, it looks more like the failures reported at the following Google hits:

I'm assuming that USB flash drives and SSDs wear out in similar fashion.

- Franc Zabkar

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I guess that's another possibility. To be fair, it hasn't been used all that much, so it would be odd if it had failed by running out of internal 'shuffling' space. It's mainly used to transport files from one machine to another rather than shunting them across the network at wifi speeds. My wife has a stick of smaller capacity that she uses for moving AVIs and similar video format files on a daily basis, and there has been no problem with that one. Both of us remove files that have been used, and are no longer needed to be on the stick.

The only reason that I called it a file corruption issue is that XP reported that the file structure was "RAW" and invalid when it tried to mount the device, and it wanted to reformat it to FAT32. I guess this could be a hardware problem, that Windoze is trying to do its best to interpret as a software issue ...

Arfa

"Arfa Daily" wrote in news:uW8Fr.203480$ snipped-for-privacy@fx06.am:

I took apart a dead SD card(from a camera found in the retention pond) and it seems to be the flash memory chip without a controller/bus IC like a flash drive has,that part being in the "card reader". I have a flash drive with a transparent casing,and you can see there's two ICs in there.

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I'm not sure this is still a problem, but some versions of Windows will refuse to format a drive if they do not recognize the file system. While an improvement from the days when Windows was eager to reformat and mark every drive it encountered, it can be a source of frustration.

The suggestion of turning to Linux is valid. Linux accommodates (demands!!) a greater awareness of the consequences of any action, and if the device is actually alive it should be possible to reformat it by a number of techniques.

PlainBill

Yep. If you look inside an SD to USB adapter, there's the 2nd chip. It takes care of translating the SD cards 8 pins to the USB 4 pins, as well as 3.3v to 5v translation.

Sorry about the screwup. I was playing with micro-SD while hacking a Droid phone, and somehow decided that it was an SD card.

More than you ever wanted to know about SD cards:

Official SD card formatter. Might as well try the real thing:

Drivel: SDIO science fiction products:

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
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Under Linux, treating it as a raw block device, you can blast away at it with impunity. Formatting, zeroing, randomizing ...

However, I had 2 of these things (8GBm, USB stick, not-very-branded, no such write-protect switch) die in the same way, within a couple of weeks. Inserting them to a machine with Linux gave a message saying basically :-

1) USB Device detected 2) It's a memory stick of this brand, size, type 3) It's write protected

Which meant that the kernel, and all user apps, treated it as such.

Windows had already turned its nose up at the sticks.

I just returned them for 2 new ones, problem went away.

It wasn't EOL due to wear and tear, they went brand new to dead within weeks when used for shifting video from PC to standalone player. The replacements are still going strong. Same "brand", different identity controller when probed by Linux.

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I agree on that :- I took a hexdump of the "failed" USB stick (see other post) and it had sections of valid data, interspersed with sections of ever incrementing numbers. That wasn't the data that was on the stick, ever. So it looks like the controller went bonkers and was returning rubbish.

To Windows, it could well read a critical sector to test the FS type, and then say "dunno. Raw?" in response to not finding a FAT/NTFS file system.

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Hmmm. That sounds pretty much like my experience. More than a couple of weeks old, but not 'old' by any stretch of the imagination. I don't really have the option of returning it. It's a FleaBay job from China, which possibly makes its quality dubious anyway - although in so saying, I buy a fair bit from modern China, and I have to say that in general, I have been pretty impressed with the build quality and VFM of most of those purchases. Of course, I see a lot of other stuff in the 'day job' that I would have to rate as 'Chinese crap', so I guess it can still be a bit of a lottery.

I guess I'll give the Linux route a try, and if it won't have any of it then, it will get retired and replaced ... :-(

Arfa

Thanks for the pointer Jeff. I tried it, and it does correctly identify the device, size and drive letter-wise. However, when you ask it to do a format, it starts, then hums and hahs about it for another five minutes, before finally declaring that the device is write protected, and that I should turn off the write protect switch ...

Oh well ... :-\

Arfa

If you don't have a linux installed machine, find a "live" CD or DVD on a magazine etc. and run direct off the CD. Most will get you to a root (console) login with no password. Once there, plug in the device, wait a few seconds and then type

dmesg

or

cat /var/log/messages

or cat /var/log/syslog

One (or more) of these will have some bumph about the USB stick at the end of it.

usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0c76, idPr usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, usb 1-2: Product: Drive 3S_USB20 usb 1-2: Manufacturer: FLASH usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 002xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

scsi10 : usb-storage 1-2:1.0 scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access FLASH Drive 3S 0 ANSI: 2 sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0 sd 10:0:0:0: [sdf] 15636720 512-byte logical blocks: (8.00 GB/7.45 GiB) sd 10:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off

I've got a SanDisk 8Gb SDHC card here that does exactly the same thing with that formatter. It is brand new and failed the first time my girlfriend put it in her camera.

Neither camera or laptops will format it, though windows does actually show the camera's filesystem, with one jpg and two movies on it, but you can't open them.

Cuh.

Gareth.