Formatting flash drive woes.

[comda]

a 32 G flash drive cost me 8 bucks a few weeks back...

Patio, its not about the money. Obviously at this stage of the game $8 is nothing considering i paid a whopping $40 for a 1gb flash drive back in 2007 (my first one back then) but its more about decreasing electronic waste and perhaps learning a thing or two. Since I'm putting together some older machines, i figured smaller drives would be nice to have around for USB limitations, but also why throw out something that potentially works, but is just being difficult? Gotta give it a solid shot before declaring it broken and throwing it out. I do appreciate all the help.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi
Have you considered looking at the usb stick with a disk hex editor. Like can you read the data over the full capacity of the drive? If so can you change the data and save it back. There maybe some areas like the first 100 mb with the promotion stuff  which is not even flash memory, perhaps write once memory . If so then you can partition the drive after this area and format it for use.

Hex editor link    https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

I haven't used it in years as Paragon Disk manager which i use has a hex editor.

Something else i have noted when a pen drive fails this 8mb total capacity is quite common. I wonder if the controller chip has 8mb of cache which is what you are seeing. 

[patio]

Patio, its not about the money. Obviously at this stage of the game $8 is nothing considering i paid a whopping $40 for a 1gb flash drive back in 2007 (my first one back then) but its more about decreasing electronic waste and perhaps learning a thing or two. Since I'm putting together some older machines, i figured smaller drives would be nice to have around for USB limitations, but also why throw out something that potentially works, but is just being difficult? Gotta give it a solid shot before declaring it broken and throwing it out. I do appreciate all the help.

Fair enuff...and well put

[comda]

Try the app in the link I provided for low level formatting of the drive.

I hate to give in, but i do suspect we have a faulty drive.. tried 2 tools so far. both fail even attempting the format

[comda]

Not precisely the same issue but there are some additional suggestions on a similar problem here. One poster suggests using "BootICE" to rectify the problem with the flash drive. You might try that if you don't have any luck with the other formatting tools.

tried this as well, and it still shows as 8mb.. maybe the drive is FUBAR??