malfunctioning USB FDD

[4imai]

I bought a usb fdd because I need it to revive an Acer laptop that died on me after a firmware update.
The usb fdd is recognized on several PC's and laptops (all on WXP) but when I enter a floppy it identifies it as an unformatted floppy even after I formatted several HD floppies in an internal fdd of a PC.
When I try to format the floppy in the USB drive I get a message after a few seconds that the formatting could not be completed.

Could this be caused by a misalignment of the head or is there another cause ?

Can this be repaired or should I trash the device ? (Shipping it back to the seller cost me more than what I payed for it)

Thanks for any help

 

[Slaymate]

There's really no telling what's wrong with the floppy.

But it's not that hard to turn a flash drive into a bootable device.

Boot From A USB Flash/Pen/Key Drive

 

[4imai]

Yes I know but I need a USB FDD to do a blind firmware upgrade on my Acer aspire laptop. The laptop only beeps after an unsuccessful firmware upgrade and it seems that the only way to revive it is to set some dip switches underneath the keyboard, create a crisis disk with the firmware on a floppy and pray and hope. It has been tried with flash drives without success. I like to try it with a HP floppy drive flash that seems to emulate a FDD with the switch in position 1 and act as a normal 1G flash drive in position 2 but I can't find any reports.