Help getting USB Flash Drive to Work

[Garibaldi]

A friend of mine, who has a mac, also has a 128 MB flash drive. Recently when he would try to plug it into his mac (OS X) it would give him an error saying that "There are no Filesystems that Mac OS can read" and gave him either the option to ignore or eject. He gave it to me to see if I could fix it.

I plugged it into my windows machine (XP), but it said that the drive needed to be formatted, so I tried formatting it (fat32), but then windows said error, cannot format because the disk is write protected.

I then decided to try it out in linux, so I booted up Knoppix 3.6 (I don't have parted on my hd install and I didn't want to edit my fstab for this) and it recongized the drive but couldn't mount it. I opened up qtparted as root and tried to make a new partition table but it also gave me an error, I was running it in a konsole, here is the output:

root@ttyp0[knoppix]# qtparted
Warning: Unable to open /dev/sda read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sda has been opened read-only.

This makes me think that the "write-protection" or "read only" filesystem is what is interferring with my efforts to reformat it. How do I override this so I can read and write to this drive? BTW, the lock slider on the side is in the unlock position so I know that is not the issue.

One more thing, I tried changing the permissions by right clicking on sdb (the flash drive) in Konqueror (I"m running KDE) and went to properties and tried to change the permissions but that wouldn't work either.

Any ideas on how to fix this?
Thanks.

[Garibaldi]

One more thing... could I possibly modify fstab or something to include rw instead of (I haven't checked, but I'm guessing) r, and would this make it read/write? Or is there an app (win32 or linux) that would let me override the write protection protocol to destroy all data on the disk so I could then reformat it. This seems like such a waste otherwise. BTW, I don't care about keeping any of the files on the disk so destructive methods are fine.

[ps2daddy]

As far as the write protection goes does your flash stick have a little tiny write protect switch on it?

Do you know the exact brand name and model number of the flash drive?

If you reformat your memory stick fat 32 it should work fine in your mac
Format it fat32 on the mac select DOS format

[Garibaldi]

As far as the write protection goes does your flash stick have a little tiny write protect switch on it?

Do you know the exact brand name and model number of the flash drive?

If you reformat your memory stick fat 32 it should work fine in your mac
Format it fat32 on the mac select DOS format

The write protect switch is in the off position but it still says that its write protected.

The brand name is Pointe.

The problem is that I cannot format it because no matter what filesystem I mount it in it only mounts as "read-only." Is there an app for wn32, linux, os x, that could override this "write protection" and allow me to format this drive? Do you have a link?

[Dr. DOS]

Most flash drives come with a drivers / utiity programs for Win98 and older OS's.

I'd go up to SANDISK.com and see if they have a format utility for their drives. (really should work with any flash drives) .... may help get past that barrier... I would call mfg too.. .possibly device is not compatible with Mac's

Good luck

[Garibaldi]

Most flash drives come with a drivers / utiity programs for Win98 and older OS's.

I'd go up to SANDISK.com and see if they have a format utility for their drives. (really should work with any flash drives) .... may help get past that barrier... I would call mfg too.. .possibly device is not compatible with Mac's

I could check and see if there is a site for Pointe.... Maybe there is a utility on there. Do you know of a utility that would work with any brand of flash drive (a universal program) that would allow a reformat?

It does work with macs though because that is what he was using it on a mac and it worked fine. Then one day it wouldn't open the drive and now windows says that its "write protected" and cannot format.

[Marty2003]

You might try opening the drive in a hex editor like winhex, then filling the entire drive with 0's.


Pull out the stick then stick it back in. If you try to open it in explorer it'll say it's unformatted. Format it to Fat32 or Fat16 and see if that works.

I had an old 64MB MP3 flash disk that went bad, I did this and it regained flash drive ability, but it still doesn't work as a MP3 player.

If it messes up your drive I take no responsibility

[Garibaldi]

I'd go up to SANDISK.com and see if they have a format utility for their drives. (really should work with any flash drives) .... may help get past that barrier... I would call mfg too.. .possibly device is not compatible with Mac's

I tried looking for Pointe, but I couldn't find anything.

I may try that winhex thing, but would that really make any difference because I CANNOT mount the drive read/write, for some reason it only mounts read only. Why is this?
Any other ideas?