I found a SanDisk Cruzer Mini USB Flash Drive, or what was left of one, in a parking lot. It still appears to work, I get the USB tone when I plug it in and there is a yellow light that glows, then flashes.
The device doesn’t show up in the drives list, I had to use the hardware manager to even identify it. Tried re-booting with it plugged in and it halted my boot up. I don’t have “USB device” listed as any of my boot options so not sure what was up with that. Viewing the device in the manager says it has a Code 10 “This device cannot start”.
Is there any way of viewing the contents of the drive? Re-formatting? Chunk it?
I was mainly just curious about what was on it. I’m running XP SP2, I never got any “New Device Found” screen or really any recognition except the USB “bloomp-bloomp” tone when I plugged it in. I did get the “Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray, so the computer knows something is there, just no way to explore the directories or anything.
It was physically damaged, mainly cosmetically. It looks fine inside with the case removed, I don’t think any of the innards were damaged.
How important is the data worth to you that you plan to save on the USB drive? How much is your time worth to you? If the value of either is more than the nominal cost with buying a new USB drive, you have your answer.
“I was mainly just curious about what was on it” is still the answer. I don’t have anything I want to save to a USB flash drive. I found one in a parking lot, was curious as to what it contained and was looking for some advice from people more familiar than myself with the use and operation of these devices.
That’s really all there is to it. My time? Shoot, I don’t know. I spent about 15 minutes over lunch fiddling with it. I might spend 15 more minutes after work, I might spend more time, or less, I really couldn’t say.
At this point it’s more like a puzzle. How much time would you spend solving a puzzle? A Rubik’s Cube costs a couple of dollars, but I spent a lot longer trying to solve that than I plan on spending on this thing.
Do USB drives have different formatting between Windows and Mac? If so, it might be a Mac-formatted drive, which windows recognizes as an external device, but can’t read the file system. Have you got an Apple computer you could try it on?
If it’s just an obvious broken connection somewhere, you can re-solder it yourself. In your case, it could be a broken solder joint between the USB plug and circuit board. There are four pins that need to be connected for it to work properly, and if some are broken the computer can still recognize that some (non-functioning) USB device is plugged in. Fix that connection, and it might work. Still, there’s a good chance that something else is irreparably destroyed.
Right, they use different file systems — by default anyway.
MacOS encourages you to use Apple’s own HFS+, though it will also format volumes as HFS or UFS. (And read and write to such volumes of course.) There are also third-party add-ons to enable read access for Linux’s Ext2, and Windows’ NTFS.
I’m not a Windows person, so I’m not familiar with what’s available for going in the opposite direction. I thought there was something out there to enable read access to HFS. I haven’t heard of anything for accessing HFS+, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there somewhere.
Should be an easy thing to search for though at a Windows shareware site.
It might be working fine but it is trying to use a drive letter already assigned to another usb device. I use multiple thumbs from multiple manufacturers and with the very make of thumb you are talking about I had to assign it a new drive letter before windows could see it.