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How to fix a dead flash drive (or USB key)

January 15th, 2007


One of my flash drives suddenly died today. It all happened when XP suddenly fro
ze for some reason. after rebooting, the device was dead - XPdetected it as a 0m
b device (and attempted to format it as such - which didn t work)
After a little research I was able to revive the drive, and heres the procedure
(pretty easy):
1. Download and install the HP Drive Key Boot Utility
2. Open the desktop icon and select the correct flash drive under device
3. Select the file system you want to format to (FAT, FAT32, NTFS)
4. Tick Quick Format
5. Click start
Officially this software (HP Drive Key Boot Utility) is meant for HP disks, but
unofficially it seems to work fine at formatting most flash media, even digital
camera cards.
Entry Filed under: Hacks, Misc

If a USB item is not being recognised, try using USBDeview (freeware download) to u
ninstall it. Then when you restart the computer, with luck it will now be recogni
sed as found new hardware and will be reinstalled.
You may also need to run the HP Drive Key Boot Utility to reformat as well, to get
the full memory back.
If it still isn t working, I m sorry, but it looks like the hardware is faulty and w
ill need replacing.

Sometimes a USB stick can get messed-up partition/fs info. You can often fix thi
s quickly and easily from the command line in Linux by inserting the stick and u
sing fdisk on it.
You need to be super-user (use su command, and you ll need the super password, or us
e sudo use man sudo to learn more). Your stick will usually show up as /dev/sda (or
v/sdb , etc) because it s considered a SCSI-type device (i.e. sda == [s]csi [d]evice [a
] ). Use man fdisk to learn how to use fdisk. Do not skip that step, unless you re alr
eady an expert on fdisk (and if so, why are you even bothering to read this?)
BE CAREFUL, TAKE YOUR TIME, AND READ THE MANUAL if you aren t 100% sure about each
step. It s easy to screw up (e.g. wipe your boot/root drive) if you re careless, an
d no tears shall be shed for your negligence. As I provide only the clues, I dis
claim any/all liabilities.
If you do it right, you ll erase the existing partition(s) on the stick, then crea
te a new Win95/FAT32 single partition. It should show up as /dev/sda1' (or /dev/sd
b1', etc).
Then you ll even be able to use mkdosfs on it, to format it nicely, and when you pop
it in under Windows *bam* minty fresh disk!

I m also interested in creating a bootable flash drive with utilizies for running C
HKDSK on my Vista HDD while it is not running under Vista. Any suggestions?
Look into the syslinux/memdisk utilities from H. Peter Anvin. Read the documenta
tion, but to give you a leg up:
- set your BIOS to boot from USB-ZIP
- take a spare USB stick, and use fdisk to nuke its partition info, then create
partition NUMBER 4 (not 0); this is the magic ;-) - use syslinux to create a bas
ic bootable setup
- add memdisk to allow a disk image to become a virtual drive
- create/find a disk image that contains your utilities (chkdsk, etc) and stick
it in there with memdisk
- create a configuration (e.g. syslinux.cfg) that automatically launches memdisk
with your disk image
Read the documentation and manual pages for the related command carefully. I kno
w it might be overwhelming, but humans are the most capable lifeforms in the kno
wn universe. You can DO EET!

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