Fix a Flash Drive?

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MPH: 3.5Ghz i7 | MPS: 2.66Ghz Xeon | iPhone 4S | iPad 2 | MacBook 13"
Ok here's the story and what's happening.

Last year I bought a I/O Magic 2.2 Giga Bank for a portable flash drive for moving files and store files. I was currently working for a landscape designer and I was using a Windows Notebook at the time. I copied some files from my notebook to the flash drive and then went to plug it into one of his open USB ports on his keyboard. I've done this before with no problems, but this time the Mac gave me a message saying it didn't have the power to run the USB port and that it would be turned off. I said ok. The drive didn't show up on the screen so I thought it would be safe to pull it out and copy the files another way. So I went to plug it into my windows notebook and clean it off and it wouldn't show up. I've since tried to use it in many different computers and operating systems and I still haven't been able to get it to work.

There is a light on the unit that flashes blue once and then about every 10 seconds flashes again. When I try to load Disk Utility in Mac it just continues to give me the "Gathering disk information.." screen and does nothing. I even let it run all night and still didn't finish. When I remove the drive it loads up just fine and even knows the brand and make of the flash drive, but I can't format it or repair it at all. I've also done this on a Windows machine and it does pretty much the same thing, it just shows up for a few seconds and then disappears, but for those few seconds it shows the brand and model just fine.

Is there anything I can do to fix this, I'd like to get this flash drive back online as it is a 2.2GB unit and I did pay $150 bucks for it. Just seems such a waste to throw it out and try to buy a new one....
 
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Mike.Bowden
Joined
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MPH: 3.5Ghz i7 | MPS: 2.66Ghz Xeon | iPhone 4S | iPad 2 | MacBook 13"
Ok, since I haven't had any responses and there are plenty of people viewing it. I'm going to write up a short tutorial here, since I figured out how to fix it and then I'll do a more extensive one later on for MacTP.

First things first, you will need a Windows computer. I know, I hated it too, but I had to drag out my old Windows notebook.

Then you'll need a free application that does a low level format on the drive.
This can be found here http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

After you've installed the application, make sure the flash drive has been plugged in for at least 5 minutes and that Windows is at least seeing it in the device manager. Then run the program and select the flash drive in the list.

The next screen will have three taps at the top, select the low level tab and then click format or next, can't remember exactly what it says.

****BTW THIS WILL EARASE EVERYTHING ON THE FLASH DRIVE WITH NO WAY TO RECOVER****

You will more than likely see a bunch of errors, that's normal from what I can tell. Once the program has finished, 2 gigs took me a minute. Go to the disk management tool located in the administrative tools and you should see the new flash drive with no partition. Initialize the drive and then partition it however you'd like.

I did FAT32 and then removed it properly from the computer. Then I plugged it into my Mac and erased the drive and changed it to a Mac Journaled drive and change the name to something I like.

That's it, drag the drive to the trash and you can now remove it. BTW this only took me a year and a half to figure out. ;) Really it only took me a few hours cause I tried for about 20 minutes a year ago and couldn't get it working and decided to just put it away. I got it out today hoping I'd find a way to fix it and after an hour of reading and searching I figured it out.
 

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