Non-Working Cruzer Flash Drive

You might be lucky and a cap has gone SC. More often the controller chip is dead.

You might have done something that corrupted the RAM. (I did this to one by accident.) If this is the case, it's unlikely you'll be able to get it working again.

Was it setup with an encrypted filesystem? If so, try to reinstall the Secure utilities (which won't work if you can't access the drive):

It's melted into a solid blob of silicon. Give up.

Just for fun, try testing the flash drive:

Sounds like one of the chips/caps has shorted out. Throw it in the bin & get a new one.

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

it's possible the controller IC has failed. I have an Attache flash drive with a transparent case,you can see two large ICs;one is the memory IC and one the controller.

Well one of the most common (non physical abuse) problem is corruption of the file system since there is a unique read/write algorithm used to spread the usage of the file system over the entire flash memory.

Unfortunately this isn't something that can be recovered from by the average person.

Meat Plow wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.alt.net:

but his drive is not even recognized by the PC.

Probably the most common fault I've seen is a result of physical abuse, and that is minute cracks in the print or soldered joints where the USB connector meets the pcb. Repairable in some cases tho it requires the touch of a midwife to be successful.

Ron

Actually, there's another possibility. It might be a counterfeit flash drive.

In the past, I've run into various flash drives and camera cards that were counterfeit. They didn't last. A few were dead on arrival. Looks like the Sandisk Cruzer drive is a candidate:

Topic drift: I've been testing the speed of flash drives with FDBench. It works but isn't really very useful. Most of the hard disk benchmark utilities don't seem to recognize a flash drive as a hard disk. Is there a Windoze program for benchmarking flash drives?

Did anyone get the memo?

This is like trying to do a recovery on a hard drive after it's been on the drill press.

Well, I remember having lots of options in SisSoft's 'Sandra'; just checked on the Web and indeed it has flash drive benchmarks. It's big, but even as paranoid as I am, I found that it doesn't muck up the system and is pretty open and transparent during and after installation.

Michael

Yes I would agree with that synopsis ! However the OP reported an "Over Current Event" Which suggests SC rather than cracks caused by flexing. Those would tend to cause intermittent loss of recognition !

"Write-leveling"

You wouldn't want to anyway, because it doesn't happen until most of the memory cells have worn out.

Try this freeware utility:

It won't be if there is not a recognizable file system.

I've repaired a couple with broken USB connectors. One that got driven over by a car tire. Best done with a stereo magnifying visor.

Depending on your flavor of Windows yes. In Vista you can use the extended info for the file transfer dialog. My 8 gig Cruiser does it at about 6 MB/s. Hard drives in my system can sustain 60Mb/s between them.

Meat Plow wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.alt.net:

hard drives are recognized even if they are brand new and no file system. other USB devices get recognized without "recognizable file systems".

Ummm... Looks like exactly what I need. However, when I downloaded it from the USA, German, and AUS sites, AVG 8.5 complained that it was infected with WIN32/HEUR virus. SuperAntiSpyware, MalwareBytes, and Spybot S&D didn't find anything wrong, so I think it's a false positive. However, I don't wanna try running it on this machine as the backups are about 2 months old. I'll try it later on some other machine. Thanks.