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Re: HELP usb flash drive
Fetched: April 11th, 2009, 12:03am CEST

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Author: fred64
Forum: Hardware
Date: 2009-04-10

Get this file "USBviewer.exe" from Microsoft or Google for it This is a small utility that lists all USB devices that are currently
connected to your computer. It will tell you the status of each device.

If you find your USB stick in the list and click on it you should get something like this

Device Name: +[P:]+USB Mass Storage Device(ClvrStuf USB Flash Drive USB Device)

PnP Device ID: VID = 08EC PID = 0016
Serial Number: 0B61FA5082A01896
Revision: 6.15

Device Type: Standard USB device - USB2.0 High-Speed

Chip Vendor: M-Systems
Chip Part-Number: (N/A)

In which case it is recoverable and you should be able to get a low level format utility from the makers to recover it, or try the following:
Open a command prompt and type as follows, then hit the Return key:
To format it to a FAT 16 file system: format x: /fs:fat
or
For a FAT32 file system I would recommend this): format x: /fs:fat32
where x: represents the drive letter of your USB drive.


However if it is listed as an unknown device and looks more like this:

Device Descriptor:
bcdUSB: 0x0000
bDeviceClass: 0x00
bDeviceSubClass: 0x00
bDeviceProtocol: 0x00
bMaxPacketSize0: 0x00 (0)
idVendor: 0x0000
idProduct: 0x0000
bcdDevice: 0x0000
iManufacturer: 0x00
iProduct: 0x00
iSerialNumber: 0x00
bNumConfigurations: 0x00

Then the USB stick is naffed, the device descriptors have been erased and without a EPROM writer you can't recover it.
throw it away !!
regards