Is this USB drive dead?

[Mahdi Akira]

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to put this thread, if it isn't, go ahead and delete it. My step-dad has a 512MB flash drive that he's used for quite some time and just recently seemed to crap out on him. He was transferring files over to it when he received some "crazy error". Unfortunately I don't know what that error was cause he didn't write it down or probably read it. It stopped the transfer process and left an incomplete copy of the file on the drive. He then tried to transfer over more files and gave him another error that said something along the lines of "file I/O error". After that he unplugged the drive and then moved it to his laptop to see if he could get files onto that, but unfortunately it didn't show up in My Computer. So I've been looking at it now on my computer, Windows XP SP2. It also doesn't show up in My Computer, it doesn't show up in Disk Management, and I've tried remapping my current drives to see if there was a letter conflict, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. I've run out of options that I can think of, any help would be great. Thanks ahead of time.

 

[Cleankutazn]

sounds dead to me

 

[Elledan]

You could try performing a full format on this drive and see if that fixes it. Beyond that I wouldn't know what to suggest. Hopefully there's no important data on this drive.

 

[unhappy_mage]

I would try a Linux livecd (if that's something you're comfortable with). Boot all the way with the drive unplugged, run 'dmesg > before', plug the drive in, run 'dmesg > after' and then run "diff before after" to see what the kernel has to say about the drive. See if it shows up in the output of 'fdisk -l'.