Fixing Your Flash drive

Introduction

Flash drives, pen drives, thumb drives are just a few names among the myriad of names for this device.  Flash drives are very popular and have great utility.  They are faster than floppies, CD-RWs or DVD-RWs and have hundreds or thousands of times more storage space.  They can last very long about 10 years. A flash drive will eventually fail after about 100,000 read/ write cycles. This device comes in many different sizes and these days I see flash drives of up to 256 GB!  Now that is an enormous amount of memory for such a small device.  Although this device is quite reliable, as with anything else, there are quality and inferior products.  So you would expect that a quality flash drive will last a long time and you will have access to your important data when you need it.  If you make the mistake and purchase a poor quality flash drive just because it is very cheap don't be surprise if you run into major problems such as the loss of your invaluable information!  Securing your peace of mind deserves investing in a reliable product.  Flash drives are usually 2.0 which is a high speed device compared to its older model the 1.1 which is much slower.

When the Flash drive Stops Working


Perhaps many of us have just used our flash drives which were working fine a moment ago and all of a sudden after placing it in again into the usb port the device refuses to open and we get the message: "The disk in drive [X] is not  formatted..."   You try to format it with no success only to be greeted with the message: "The disk in drive [X] cannot be formatted." If the electronics on the device has failed, then you will have to replace it.  However, if it is a case of the FAT 16, FAT 32 or NTFS systems becoming corrupt, then you may be able to repair the drive by reformatting.


Tools Available

I have discovered two tools that can be used to format a flash drive when the formatting facility in Windows can't get the job done.  They are HPUSBDisk and fat32format.  Fat 16 can only format a drive size up to 2 GB. So if you try to format a drive larger than 2 GB in Windows, you would not even get the option to format it using Fat 16.  Similarly, windows will give the opportunity to use FAT 32 formatting if the drive is 32 GB or smaller.  Any size larger than that will have to be formatted using NTFS.  The trick is that FAT 32 is the ideal system to use on flash drives in the sense of universal recognition.  All computer systems such as Windows, MAC and Linux recognize the FAT 32 system.  Even though NTFS is the most advanced of the three, it is not universally recognizable like the FAT 32 system.  The problem is that if you are going to use FAT 32, you would not be able to format a drive bigger than 32 GB on Windows. 


Solution

A drive up to 2 TB (2000 GB) can employ a FAT 32 system.  Any one of the two programs mentioned above can get the job done. HPUSBDisk  have a GUI interface (the regular graphic visual that you are accustomed to) so it is very easy to use.  However, fat32format needs some direction because it is done via a command line.  Download any of these free software and try to reformat your drive.  There is a great chance that you will succeed.  If you decide to use fat32format, here are the directions.  After downloading the file, copy it to the root directory (the C:\ drive).  Then open a command line either by going to "Start", "Run" and type in "cmd" and press "OK".  Or, go to "Start", "All Programs", "Accessories", "Command Prompt".  Then, to run the program, type in next to the cursor: "C:\fat32format.exe" leaving out the quotation marks. Next, type: "C:\fat32format  X:"  Leave out the quotation marks and replace X with the letter that Windows assigned to your flash drive and don't forget to put in the colon after the letter and notice a space between "format" and the drive letter "X".   You will receive a warning.  If you are sure that the drive shown is the one that you want to format then enter "y".  So make sure that you are formatting the correct drive because formatting a drive makes the data on that drive inaccessible.  And that's it.  When it is finished, you will get a report of what was done. That which we call a flash drive by any other name would function as great!