Two dead flash drives?

My dad picked up 3 jetflash JF V30 4Gb flash drives while on a trip (they were cheap ) However only one of the three drives work.

He gave them to me to look at and sure enough, two appear to be dead.

Drive one : no power light, not even recognized.

Drive two : Recognized, driver installs, is assigned a drive letter but is inaccessible. "Please insert a disk into Removable disk". It doesn't appear in in disk management either. So I can't re-format it.

Drive Three: Works as it should.

(BTW, I've tried the sticks in two desktops and a laptop in both 7 and Vista. Same results)

I don't hold out much hope for drive one, but from others experiences, is it likely that I can get drive two operational?

Or should I just give it up as a dead stick and stop wasting my time with it?

Try using a *nix live CD / DVD and see if they can mount in there - if they can (the one without power is doubtful) then try formatting it there....

thanks mate, I'll give that a go now.

EDIT:

No go. Tried a couple of live cds as well as installed opensuse. Drives weren't even detected, let alone mountable. The working drive did. 2/3 DOA rate is high enough for me to not recommend this brand/model.

On the plus side, I finally got around to making opensuse bootable again

See? Side projects rock....

As for that model being bad - I'd contact the manufacturer and see about getting replacements. I am sure if they were cheap that there is a reason (such as this) for them being cheap....

Even so they should still work cheap or not.

Exactly Joan :)

Unfortunately contacting transcend isn;t going to help as they have a replacement policy for the U.S and Canada, but it's local resellers everywhere else. (Not flying/driving 700+km for a $12 stick )

And yes, side projects do rock. Very bl**dy handy too :)

smarteyeball said:

thanks mate, I'll give that a go now.

EDIT:

No go. Tried a couple of live cds as well as installed opensuse. Drives weren't even detected, let alone mountable. The working drive did. 2/3 DOA rate is high enough for me to not recommend this brand/model.

On the plus side, I finally got around to making opensuse bootable again

LMAO yay OpenSuSe!!!

Hello...

about drive two: You said Disk Management doesn't recognize it.

have you tried diskpart? I think it handles drives in a tougher way.

on elevated cmd:

diskpart {enter}

diskpart> list disk

diskpart> select disk 1 (or your usb disk number, if you see it listed)

diskpart> clean (please make sure you got the right disk number b4 doing this)

diskpart> create partition primary

diskpart> select partition 1

diskpart> format fs=ntfs quick

diskpart> assign

diskpart> exit

hello limneos

since the drives didnt work in linux i doubt they will work in win...

He said Windows recogznizes it and assigns a drive letter. that's something to work with...
I've had similar problems, especially with USB drives that were partitioned in more than one partition...diskpart did the trick. It was just a thought anyway.

He could also try to install the multi-USB-partitions driver to see if it has such issues (If the usb stick is partitioned to more than one partition, windows might fail to recognize it properly until you've forced-installed a specific driver that supports this function)...

limneos said:

He said Windows recogznizes it and assigns a drive letter. that's something to work with...
I've had similar problems, especially with USB drives that were partitioned in more than one partition...diskpart did the trick. It was just a thought anyway.

He could also try to install the multi-USB-partitions driver to see if it has such issues (If the usb stick is partitioned to more than one partition, windows might fail to recognize it properly until you've forced-installed a specific driver that supports this function)...

For more info about the above, please ask here in this post.
I have a 16GB USB with 3 partitions, which boots and installs or runs Win732,Win764, Gparted,WinXp English,Winxp Greek, Backtrack 3, ntpasswd and another 12 OS/apps...

ohh i see what you mean....

i had a external HDD (also two flash, 4 and 8gb respectively and a 500gb) and it would not read it in xp vista and linux.....
even spinrite found it but with huge errors starting in the 1st sector and after 3 days running continously and getting to 100th sector i gave up....

i have a 500gb with 4 8gb partition (same as you with Ubuntu, Backtrack, and of course OpenSuSe would put ntpasswd but that i have it as a dvd...lol)
yay for backtrack too!!!