I decided flash-drives would be a better way to distribute data than CD’s, bought two yesterday; now both fail. I thought of posting this in GQ: Why did my flashdrives fail and what should I do about it?
The Flash-drives are Kingston USB 2.0 DataTraveler DT101B/2GB (which appear to be unavailable in U.S.A.).
First thing I did – which I suspect was the key mistake, especially since they come from factory formatted – was to reformat them using Windows defaults. Although they are 2 Gig devices and my data less than 1 Gig, space was insufficient with the “FAT” format – I needed “FAT32.” I recognized my error, decided to reformat as FAT32. One reformatted successfully, data was copied, but much of the data was garbled. The other couldn’t be reformatted – it had “Write Protected” and nothing I did removed that.
I Googled and Googled; found blogs FULL of “My flash-drive is suddenly write-protected” but with no useful answers. (One had a procedure to download a .bat to upgrade ‘regedit’ to change write-protect code. This seemed proof of Window’s inane complexity, but I did it … to no avail.)
I formed a hypothesis that my reformatting and filling up the drive was a big mistake: that the drive may have come from factory with a list of flawed sectors and their remappings and I obliterated it. But none of my Googlings turned up any confirmation of that. Surely there’d be a big WARNING somewhere if that scenario fit.
So, help please! What did I do wrong? Are these repairable? What Flashdrive brand should I buy in future? Assuming this is frequent problem, what’s the matter with my Google-fu?
"Also, if you bought these overseas, you may have bought fake ones. One common method is to use less memory, but format it to a larger size. "
yeah, this. where did you get them? online auction sites are rife with phony drives; the firmware on them is tweaked so that they report a much higher capacity than they actually have; so if you try to write more than they can actually hold, you’ll corrupt everything.
no. even if flash memory needed to do this (And I’m not sure they do; hard drives do, though) you would not be able to modify this just by formatting. this information is stored in the drive’s firmware and is typically not easily accessible.
so a useless utility from a random source that does nothing is “proof of Windows’ inane complexity?” good lord.
Thanks for the comments. It is the huge number of files that kept FAT16 from working. I “should have” known this but didn’t stop to think, as reformatting seemed (erroneously?) non-problematic. My application is write-once (or perhaps write-thrice if I have more false starts :D), so the rewrite problem with flash shouldn’t be an issue.
The capacity seemed correct. I bought them (at a premium $8 for 2GB price) from a shop I’d found trustworthy in past. Without my even asking she said they were genuine, not fakes. Of course that proves nothing.
Here’s one of several webpages discussing the issue, with responders reporting success. And yes, “the registry key StorageDevicePolicies [did] not exist, [and I did] need to create it manually.”
A writable bit signifying write-protect, with no way to rewrite it (even via a “Yes, yes I really REALLY mean it” in a Format dialog) does strike me as poor design but typical of Microsoft.
This incident would not make the Top Thirty List in my proofs that Windows is inanely complex, but that would be a different topic for a different thread.
Flash drives are among the most bullet proof peripherals I’ve ever used. Some have survived washer and dryer cycles. Return the malfunctioning drives and get some drives from a large retailer or a reputable online dealer like Newegg.
A computer store retail clerk asserting, without prompting, that the drives are not fake at purchase is just weird enough it would give me the opposite impression.