USB Flash Drives question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Matrixhasu77
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Matrixhasu77

Matrixhasu77

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Seeing as how I've been at odds with my USB flash drive as of late, I'm wondering about something. Is it possible that using a flash drive with two different versions of windows would cause the drive's file system and/or the drive itself to malfunction?

I bought a new one last week(after the one I had for a year stopped working) and have been using it to take files between my home system(XP Pro) and the computers at my college (Windows 2000 Professional) and it seemed to have fried itself within a week of purchasing it. On any system I plugged it into I received an "Unknown Device" error and Windows acted as if there weren't drivers for it(Even though windows uses it's builtin drivers for most flash drives).

I've since returned and exchanged the one I had for another one of the exact same model. I'm a little weary of using it on my school's computers because I think that's the cause of the flash drive I had first that failed. I'm also not to impressed by the brand of the drive either anymore.

Any ideas? What is it with me and long posts for small problems...
 
I dont know if this is your problem...but I discovered a little something about how flash drives come from the factory. There are two partitions, one big one for the data, and a small one at the "front" of the drive for something that you shouldn't touch (has to do with buffering I suspect). If for some reason the school computers wiped this first partition, I think it may not work (just a hunch....)

You could always try to reformat the keydrive, seeing that it is "fried" anyway. My Lexar Media keydrive is formatted as FAT16.
 
Ok... this is odd. I exchanged the "fried" one for a different one. Except this one won't power up like the other one wouldn't when I first discovered it no longer worked. This leads me to believe something with XP has gone haywire.

EDIT: Turns out it was a swapped motherboard connection that fried the first flash drive. For some reason I had my USB and Firewire connections swapped on the front unit for my motherboard. However, I still couldn't get the second to work after fixing the motherboard problem. I'm confused... how could a swapped motherboard connection fry a USB device plugged into the wrong bus(IE Firewire)?

The one I exchanged for the fried one won't even power up so I'm forced to believe it was DOA possibly.
 

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