Community Newsletter: Q&A: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?!
- 5/23/08 4:31 PM
Two possibilities
by 3rdalbum - 5/10/08 5:29 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
There are two possibilities to this:
1. Are you using the "Safely Remove Hardware" function in Windows? (it's in the system tray). This will tell Windows to write all pending data out to the drive, and then tell your applications not to try writing to the drive anymore. When Windows tells you that it's safe to remove your flash drive, only then should you unplug it.
Sometimes, background system services or applications can be accessing files invisibly on the drive. If you just "yank it out" without doing the Safely Remove Hardware procedure, and there is data being written at the time, the drive's data can be damaged, causing the contents to not be recognised.
ALWAYS do Safely Remove Hardware! Many people are too lazy to, or don't know how to do it, and they get data damage.
2. Flash memory has a limited number of "writes" before it starts to fail. Theoretically, it should be years before you start getting data damage, but if one of the cells is faulty you could get problems considerably before then.
People using non-Windows operating systems are fairly safe; their operating systems have a buffer of data to go onto the device. When a program tries to write to the drive, the operating system actually just puts it into the buffer. When the buffer gets big, the operating system writes it out to the drive. This means that there are fewer seperate write operations to the drive.
Windows, unfortunately, writes the data immediately to the drive. This helps prevent data loss when people don't use the "Safely Remove Hardware" feature, but it can lessen the life of the flash drive.
Conclusion: Your problems are probably due to data damage from not using "Safely Remove Hardware". Otherwise, maybe you should tell Windows to use a buffer for flash drives.
Flash Drives
by tosim91 - 5/10/08 6:11 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
You really was not specific as to the problem(s) of the flash drives. I will address the issue of the flash drive becoming "write-protected", wherein you can see what is on the drive, and copy from it, but NOT onto it.The Registry fix for this follows:
Re: Problem with USB flash drive-"Write Protected"
There is a simple solution for thisin the case of windows.
Just do a "regedit" for StorageDevicePolicies key. . Get
into the Registry - Press Start ->Run, enter regedit, press Ok
Click on My Computer. Then press File Export, give some file
name to backup the registry. Just in caseyou ever need to rollback.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/StorageDevicePolicies .
In the right pane select "writeprotect" . RESET the value to '0' Repeat
the same for ControlSet001 and ControlSet002 incase they exist. Now plug
in your USB drives and it should work. Else just reboot the machine and try. This works great! Hope it helps.
Flash drives.
by davey007 - 5/10/08 6:11 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I,ve had this problem a couple of times also. The computer would tell me the drive was inaccessable or couldn't read it. I stick it back in my camera and the pics are there. Put it back in my comp and it works. Go figure.Two differant cameras Two differant cards.
Flash drive
by Ladyhawk777_7 - 5/17/08 10:19 AM In reply to: Flash drives. by davey007sometimes when I want to remove my flash drive I get the message " the device 'generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later"
So then I try stopping it later but still come up with the same message so then I just take it out....luckily all my docs are still there when I plug it back in the next day....this only happens after I've been on the internet for a couple of hours but if I have not been on the internet and just been on my desktop I can take it out without that annoying message...my question is why is this happening sometimes??
Dead Flash Drives
by Larry Powell - 5/10/08 6:29 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I suspect your card reader is defective. Try a different one.
Not seen with two different flash drives for me
by leshewitt - 5/10/08 6:47 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Sorry, Paul. I've not had any problems. I used to use a Bytestor 1gb flash drive, now a 4gb PNG cheapo flash drive. I've used these in an old Toshiba laptop and a new-ish Dell laptop both running Windows XP SP2; also in a new-ish Dell laptop running Vista Home Premium. I've exchanged data with friends systems, both desktop and laptop all running XP Home and Pro.
On inserting the drive, I wait for Windows to tell me it's "ready for use" or whatever phrase it uses before I start any copying. My habit on removing the drive is to go into Windows Explorer, check that the right data is stored on the flash drive, then right mouse click on the drive and choose "safely remove" (on Vista), then wait for it to say I can take it out.
I must confess I've not used flash drives extensively, I would guess a few dozen transfers in total. Both flash drives still work fine and I've never had a data corruption or inaccessible data.
Finally, I never use them as the sole location for data, only for a copy or for data transfer between systems. I don't trust myself not to lose them!
Lost drives
by augie62 - 5/10/08 7:05 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
This happened to me several times. I would have to "restore" my computer to retrieve my drives. The final fix for me was to get rid of MacAfee Viruscan and get a different anti-virus program. I bought the Zonealarm program and have had no problems in eight months.
Software on the PC
by leshewitt - 5/10/08 7:34 AM In reply to: Lost drives by augie62Never thought about software on the system. I've used the free version of AVG anti-virus on my Vista laptop since day one; I uninstalled the supplied McAfee. Nothing too deep in the system apart from that.
I run AVG Free on our XP systems also after a while. Friends systems I've connected to were on a variety, including Norton, AVG and McAfee.
Dead flash drives
by herman56z - 5/10/08 7:24 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Paul, I had the same problem, but only with one flash drive. I opened it up, carefully taking the plastic covers off(not possible with all FD) Using a magnifier, I examined the area where the contacts are soldered onto the circuit board. I could see that three of them where loose (solder cracked). I used a soldering iron and solder sucker, removed the old solder and resoldered the joints. Closed up and test. All the data was still there and it was working fine. Dust on the computer's USB contacts can also cause trouble, depending on the environment. Hope this help. Other factors like software and drivers I asume are OK.
Herman
Port addressing
by rajjoshi - 5/10/08 7:40 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Try inserting the flash drives before turning on the PC. If problem gets solved, its due to port addressing.
Windows not recognizing removable drives
by wotnwabbit - 5/10/08 8:25 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Paul, I had a similar (if not the same) problem. A new computer I purchased would not recognize removable (USB) drives. I'm not clear on the reason, but I found the cure.
I accidentally found the cause when I installed the Microsoft "powertoy" TweakUI.
Apparently the installation of Windows XPHome on my computer was set so that it failed to recognize USB drives.
I corrected it by opening TweakUI, then drilling down to "My computer/Drives".
I found that there was no check mark beside the drive letters that were to be assigned to drives other than the non-removable drives in my system.
Correcting the problem was simple. I just placed a tick beside all the drives I knew should be assigned to the USB slots.
I'm sure some techie will have a better explanation for the reason, but this is the cure I found.
Problem recognizing flash drive
by jcoates - 5/10/08 10:45 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had similar problems with my 6 year old laptop. The problem went away when I flash upgraded the bios in the computer.
I hope this helps. Jim
Possible reasons
by stanmorganVideo - 5/10/08 11:57 AM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Paul
The following are possible reasons for dead flash drives:
1. Flash drives have limited read-write cycles.
2. Computer maleware has infected the flash drive; specifically a Trojan Horse may be resident on your computer that has taken over the flash drive. Run antiviral software, keystroke blockers (keystrokes to your flash drive may be recorded by a hacker), spyware that download cookies to your computer. This may be evident for any computer that is unprotected. You may run antiviral software to check your flash drive.
3. Antiviral software has detected maleware on your flash drive, and has isolated the flash drive. For example if you stored music downloads from the internet that are notorious for computer resident viruses, these music files would then contaminate your flash drive given you stored music downloads. Thereby, when you run the antiviral software it may have deleted these files, or completely quarantined your flash drives.
4. If you run your defragmentation software remove your flash drive beforehand, given this eats up the remaining read/write cycles.
5. Always stop your flash drive and receive the message that it is safe to remove the drive. By removing the drive beforehand this may erase the drive and system components that store information that concerns the controller/microprocessor thereby effectively causing the flash drive to be inaccessible.
DLA or Not to DLA___That is the Question
by HomelessClarence - 5/10/08 3:55 PM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Paul, you have become a victim of the Dreaded DLA (Drive Letter Assignment) phenomenon.
Most flash drives nowadays have all sorts of fun stuff on them as well as just the storage. Additionally, most flash drives are made for Windows XP users... because they dominate the landscape. Because of this, the Boot of the drives are often for Windows XP and the drive is often formatted in NTFS.
Vista PCs will recognize the drive, but most times will boot and run the software in emulation... slowly in emulation... so you think you have a defective flash drive. Sometimes, the Vista DLA doesn't "like" the XP DLA boot on the drive, so they fight. As you can imagine, the PC OS wins sometimes, the flash Drive Boot OS wins sometimes. Either way, you win some and you lose some.
However, XP PCs are not immune to this. Depending on whether you "Hot Plug", boot the machine from the drive, boot the machine and then run the boot of the flash drive, or sometimes you have no control over who is running the DLAs, you get the problems you are running across.
Don't get me started on Linux, Unix and Solaris machines. Most Windows 98 machines will never see the drive without a software upgrade. Windows NT and 2000 machines (yes, they are still out there) often don't see these flash drives either unless you boot the machine with the USB drive plugged in.
Interestingly enough, we've found Intel Macs NEVER have a problem with ANY USB flash drives.
What can I say?
So there, a mess and still NO DISCUSSION about what happens when your Anti-Virus and Firewall detect a foreign Application starting up.
We usually end up erasing and formatting the drive to match that of the PC (usually NTFS) and install our own utilities (if you need some). Usually ... (usually, not always), this works best.
BTW: There's an excellent video on CNET on how to install your own OS and apps on a flash drive you might want to look at.
Problems With Flash Drives DOA
by JCipo - 5/10/08 4:55 PM In reply to: Dead flash drives? What's going on here?! by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had one flash drive fail and wanted to find out why. What I found was that I had to get permission by the computer to disconnect the flash drive. Usually, without doing this the drive worked but one day it didn't.
There might be other problems but since I learned to get permission I haven't had a problem.
Remember to get permission, you click on an icon in the lower right desktop screen...when using Windows.
JCipo
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