USB Flash Disk Low-Level Format

[prowler]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

HDD_Tools_Floppy_Images.7z on Magix FTP

I had a bit of spare time to upload it.

Thanks once again, DemonHellraiser, I've just downloaded it!

Methinks if you uploaded that on dial-up, you must have had a lot of spare time...

@Zetr0/TCD/DemonHellraiser/Ed_Cruse/cosmicfrog:

Based on my experience with it, I reckon that Partition Magic 8.0 has the best chance of achieving a low-level format of USB flash disks. I really can't believe I didn't think of it without your reminder, Zetr0.

Of course, just because it has worked well for me with hard drives, that doesn't mean it will work just as well with flash media. But if you've had it solve similar problems with bad sectors on USB memory sticks, Zetr0, then I look forward to trying it out on my Maxell disks.

However, I have lost no data yet due to these being only backup media, and I have enough of these devices with no errors to be able to take my time with this. So, because experience in solving this problem with these devices is relatively uncommon, the least I can do is try out every one of the utilities you have each recommended or supplied and report how each of them performs for the benefit of all users.

I must say that some of the programs you have uploaded, DemonHellraiser (DHR?), will be very useful additions to my toolbox in any case!

Thank you all for your contributions to this thread.

I hope I can provide some useful feedback in return.

[DH]

Originally Posted by prowler

DemonHellraiser (DHR?)

For short just DH will do

[prowler]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

For short just DH will do

[cosmicfrog]

has any1 tried spinrite on usb media yet ?

[Rabbit80]

I would suggest you read this page:

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_fix_bad_...ash_drive.html

It explains why marking sectors as "bad" will not work on flash drives!!!

[jmmijo]

I would also recommend Ultimate Boot CD as this has a ton of Floppy/HDD Tools as well

[cosmicfrog]

ask leo he the man, we he is for a mate of mine he`s got all his pod casts and the shows he dose from canada, also friends with the guy who wrote spinrite

but this is just a pale imposter hehehhehehehheheh

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Rabbit80

I would suggest you read this page:

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_fix_bad_...ash_drive.html

It explains why marking sectors as "bad" will not work on flash drives!!!

Hey, Rabbit80, don't be so negative! These drives of mine are not worn out, as far as I can tell they were shipped with bad sectors and the faulty ones are not getting any worse.

I'll let everyone know the outcome in due course. If they're no good, then you can gloat!

[prowler]

Originally Posted by jmmijo

I would also recommend Ultimate Boot CD as this has a ton of Floppy/HDD Tools as well

Thanks for your recommendation, jmmijo.

I have no previous experience with UBCD, so I've just downloaded 4.1.1 ISO version to have a look. It doesn't look half bad either!

[prowler]

Originally Posted by cosmicfrog

has any1 tried spinrite on usb media yet ?

I've just downloaded SpinRite (v6.0). I'll investigate this tool along with the others.

[prowler]

OK, I'm ready to embark on my testing programme, but let's just establish the test conditions:

The test device is a 2GB Maxell USB 2.0 Flash Drive. When tested with Virtual Console's latest USB Flash Drive Tester v1.12, 64 fatal read errors are reported due to "I/O device errors". The Flash Drive Tester destroys all existing data on the drive, which is left unformatted. In this condition, it is an ideal device for testing the various formatting tools for their ability to low-level format USB flash disks and map out bad sectors.

The Maxell USB flash drives are supplied with a partitioning and formatting utility for Windows 'iStar.exe',



which installs a copy of itself on the target drive. Choosing a single partition and full format



produces a FAT16 formatted disk



with these characteristics:
2,038,104,064 bytes total disk space
32,768 bytes per cluster
62,198 total clusters
and no clusters marked bad.

This utility performs no integrity checking, therefore it does not detect the problems with the drive.

Attempts to read back files copied to the drive will fail with crc errors if they span one or more unmarked bad clusters.

This is the problem affecting a few of these flash drives, which I am trying to solve.

Tomorrow I will try Partition Magic 8.0

[prowler]

The Windows-based Partition Magic 8.0 application is unable to detect the USB flash drive, whether formatted or not, but the Rescue Disks' DOS-based application can.

Dos-based Partition Magic 8.0 runs from a Caldera DR-DOS 7.02 boot disk. It identifies my hard disk drive as 'Disk 1' and the USB flash drive as 'Disk 2'.

Before restoring the flash drive to its unformatted state in preparation for the test, I started the computer from the Partition Magic 8.0 boot disk to see if the flash drive would be detected without additional drivers.

Fresh from formatting with Maxell's iStar utility, as detailed in the previous post, the flash drive was found to have a bad partition with "Partition table error #116". Partition Magic was not able to delete this bad partition.

Unformatted once more, the flash drive now showed only unallocated space.

Partition Magic's bad sector checking is disabled by default. Choosing a single partition filling all available space and FAT16 formatting (to match the original specification) produced a disk with these characteristics:
2,031,321,088 bytes total disk space
32,768 bytes per cluster
61,991 total clusters
and no clusters marked bad.

Even with bad sector checking disabled, this is approximately 6.5MB less total disk space than that which results from an iStar format, choosing the same options.

However, attempts to read back files copied to the drive still fail with crc errors, confirming that bad clusters on the disk have not been mapped out.

Incidentally, when new, these 2GB flash drives are formatted thus:
2,096,857,088 bytes total disk space
32,768 bytes per cluster
63,991 total clusters.

Nothing I have tried so far will replicate this format. Even the iStar Flash Disk Format utility supplied with these drives falls 62.5MB short of achieving this.

I then repeated the test with Partition Magic's bad sector checking enabled. I wish I had disconnected my hard drive before trying this, as the procedure took NINE HOURS to complete!

When finished, I ran chkdsk on the drive, which reported screensful of lost chains and some 3MB in bad sectors. An attempt to convert the lost chains to files with chkdsk/f failed because "another process" had "locked the drive".

After rebooting, Windows reported the drive as unformatted. DOS-based Partition Magic found a bad partition with "Partition table error #116".

Nowhere in the documentation for Partition Magic 8.0 does it claim that there are features which are designed to work with anything except hard drives.

I downloaded and installed Partition Magic 8.01 update (11.5MB):
http://www.softwarepatch.com/utiliti...n-magic-8.html
to see if it changed anything, but it didn't help.

At this point, I think that Partition Magic's bad sector mapping was, in this instance thwarted by the presence of a bad sector in the partition table area of the disk. The partition table error code #116 means that the partition table contains two inconsistent descriptions of the partition's starting sector. This error could occur if one of these descriptions is corrupted by disk failure at that location.

I have heard of techniques that can be used to restore hard drives with bad track 0, and perhaps they could also be used with flash drives. However, I doubt whether Partition Magic would have been programmed to deal with this situation, so I may have to select another flash drive to continue with this testing.

SpinRite is compatible with flash media, but it is not recommended for use with them because of their limited write cycles. In this case, though, I think it is justified to see if it has a way of dealing with this problem.

[Rabbit80]

Try this utility - I dont know if it supports flash though

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Rabbit80

Try this utility - I dont know if it supports flash though

Thanks, Rabbit80!

MakeBad is a utility to mark weak sectors , but a quick scan through the docs suggests that it might only work with hard drives.

I'll give it a try, though, possibly before SpinRite...

BTW, it requires that you also download this file:
http://hddguru.com/download/software...4.6archive.zip
[Edit] No, this file is only required for the older version!

[Zetr0]

@prowler

WOW you have spent an inordinate amount of time on these flash devices, I would of declared them dead by now!

either you really need 2 GB's badly OR you have tooo many of them LOL

which ever it maybe, good luck on this quest, and a huge thanks for keeping us informed of you exploites

[prowler]

@Zetr0:

Yes, actually I do have rather a lot of them.

...and thanks for the feedback.


[Edit]
@All contributors to this thread:

Eventually, I aim to test every one of the utilities recommended, suggested or uploaded here, along with a few others I have collected, to find any which can solve the problem of bad sectors on flash media.

With a bit of luck, the results will provide a useful reference for all users.

This is the other reason I am persisting with these devices.

[prowler]

MakeBad is described as a utility to recover hard drives with weak sectors. The latest version, available here:
http://files.hddguru.com/download/Software/Makebad/
is 0.9.1 beta, dated 20-12-2006, and comes as a self-extracting FreeDOS 1.1 boot disk which runs the application from a RAM drive.

Once you have generated the boot disk, it is only necessary to connect the device you wish to scan to the PC.

The interface is not at all polished and some of the options are confusing, so it is best if the device under test is the only drive connected, apart from the floppy, as recommended in the minimal documentation provided.

Searching for USB drives is disabled by default. A menu is provided for this option, but it has not been implemented properly, so the default selection must be changed manually by editing the boot disk's CONFIG.SYS file.

With this option enabled, the flash drive is found, and the USB ASPI drivers are loaded.

The program lists the flash drive under SCSI drives (ASPI), ID:0 LUN:0 HDD: Not formatted. The firmware version (8.07) is reported correctly, as is the number of logical blocks (LBA: 3,981,311) and the block size (512 bytes), but every time an attempt is made to select the device, the program responds with "Drive not ready" or "This drive does not support LBA mode".

Flash drives do not appear to be supported. I guess this is because these devices are not fully DOS ASPI compliant.

Two similar utilities, HDAT2 and HDDScan, were referred to in the documentation for MakeBad and its components. I shall be looking at these next.

Hi prowler,

I had the same problem as you mate and here is what I did to RESOLVE IT!
(This works for Maxell Retractable 2GB Pen Drive which has two partitions)

1.
Insert your Maxell 2GB Pen Drive

2.
Run istar.exe and select Format

3.
Make sure that you allocate the MAXIMUM of bytes to your NON-PASSWORD Protected drive. Make note of the drive letters.

4.
Format the drive

5.
Go to Disk Management and Format the Drive that the istar.exe software is.

This operation did the job for me as it whipped the istar.exe software with ease. I removed the Pen Drive re-insert it and no istar.exe software popped up.

You should now have two drives showing on your computer one with 20 to 40mb or less size and the other with about 1.85GB size.

NOTE that you will not be able to just simply delete the 40mb or less drive from Disk Management as this option is disabled.


If you want to merge the two Partitions together you will require Paragon Partition Manager Version 10.0

I can 100% guarantee that the above program does the job as I now have only one partition with the size of 1.85GB showing on my Computer.


I hope this helps out


Let me know if this worked for you


Regards


Shpirtshqipe

[prowler]

Hi Shpirtshqipe, and welcome to EAB!

Thanks very much for your suggestion.

I still have a box of these flash drives in 1GB and 2GB sizes which I have not touched for over a year because of this problem and the amount of effort I had assumed would be required to fix it.

I still have all the utilities that were suggested or uploaded by the other members who have contributed to this thread, but I just haven't got around to picking up again where I left off.

I would still very much like to fix up these drives to make them reliable, so I am very keen to try out your suggestion - all the more so as it was successful for you.

It seemed to be only the 2GB drives which were problematic, IIRC, so the procedure you have outlined may be the only one I need.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply to my thread after all this time. I'll give it a go in the next few days and report back with my findings, or I may come back with a question or two if I'm not quite clear on some point.

[prowler]

Hi Shpirtshqipe,

I tried your suggestion on one of my problematic Maxell 2GB USB flash pen drives, but it didn't improve things.

I ran the iStar formatting utility, selected Format and moved the slider all the way up so as to allocate maximum space to the second non-password protected drive.

On exiting the program, when the format was completed, the first (smaller) partition on the drive popped up an Explorer window showing the iStar.exe utility.

Formatted that Partition using Disk Management, which got rid of the iStar software.

Then shutdown the machine, because I don't like re-plugging those devices, and when restarting the flash drive showed two logical drives, 1.91MB and 1.89GB, respectively.

I filled both logical drives to full capacity with files copied from my main hard drive and then copied them back to my second hard drive.

The first logical drive performed fine, but eleven files totalling 1009MB had crc data errors out of a total of 1279 files on the 1.89GB drive.

That demonstrates that the iStar utility fails to map out the bad sectors on the device, and it is why I started this thread.

I realize that later flash devices are much improved over these early examples, but I am reluctant to bin these even though they are virtually useless unless 100% reliable.

Finally, I should say that my reply is not intended to be critical at all of your attempt to help, which is most welcome, thanks.

This will not be an easy one to solve, but I am convinced that there must be some utility which is capable of formatting these devices, detecting bad sectors whilst doing so and marking them bad so that they are not subsequently used.

Such a utility, if it exists, will solve the problem, because these drives are not deteriorating. The number of bad sectors detected by the low-level formatting utilities I have tried never changes, but these utilities will not actually mark them bad.