Can you reflash a flash drive? Or... something?

[Jayce]

So, long story short. Hooked up a new computer and accidentally plugged in the front USB ports to the firewire pins on the motherboard. Now, it fried my flash drive.

Is it possible to fix? When I plug that sucker in, now it gets reeeeeeeeeeally hot.

It killed 3 flash drives... my good 1 plus two random 1gb ones I had laying in a box. Any idea if this can be fixable?

 

[MrLoLeR]

Even though it gets hot, does Windows recognize the drive?

If Windows does recognize, have you tried to reformat the drive?

You can download and install the HP Drive Key Boot Utility to reformat the drive to FAT/FAT32/NTFS .

HP Drive Key Boot Utility - HP Business Support Center

Its meant for HP flash drives but everyone and their neighbor seems to reccommend it for multiple brands. Worth a shot.

 

[Nitestick]

a few questions for you:

do the drives work on another computer? if so do they still heat up? have you tried them in the rear ports? are you certain you have rewired the front ports correctly this time?

 

[Jayce]

No. The drives in question are not recognized on another computer.

I have a 1gb, 2gb, and 8gb. The 8gb gets hot as ****. The other two do not get hot. However, all 3 are not recognized. I tried them in Ubuntu + XP Pro.

 

[Nitestick]

well i'd say they're dead unfortunately. you can still try looking in disk management to see if they show up (start>run>type "diskmgmt.msc" without quotes and hit enter). if they do, reformat them.

 

[Jayce]

Yeah, I'm thinking they are... especially the 8gb one. If it's plugged in for 15ish seconds or more, when you pull it out the metal usb portion is extremely hot. The other one doesn't get hot at all, but shares the same non-responsive characteristics as the 8gb one.

Oh, and let me take the opportunity to share this with you guys.

BACK YOUR **** UP!!

I am sooo happy that I had a folder called "FlashDriveBackup" and every couple days I would copy all of my data from my flash drive and paste it to the FlashDriveBackup folder. So when my 8gb one died, I popped in my 4gb drive and copied everything to it. (I only had 2.6gb of data). So now, I'm back in business.

So please, guys, back that stuff up. It's so easy... I'm so happy I did...


EDIT - btw, do you think that screwup I did could have damaged the motherboard? Or do you think the most that could have happened was, you know, a dead flash drive?

 

[Nitestick]

BACK YOUR **** UP!!

I am sooo happy that I had a folder called "FlashDriveBackup" and every couple days I would copy all of my data from my flash drive and paste it to the FlashDriveBackup folder.

yeah i've been thinking of writing a script that would sort of synch my work data from my mp3 player (which i use as a flash drive a lot of the time) every time i plug it in to my desktop and laptop so that i will always have a HDD backup of work. i really should get around to it seeing as i lost my last mp3 player (my friend gave me a replacement of the same model though) and i had to redo 3 assignments for college.

 

[Jayce]

yeah i've been thinking of writing a script that would sort of synch my work data from my mp3 player (which i use as a flash drive a lot of the time) every time i plug it in to my desktop and laptop so that i will always have a HDD backup of work. i really should get around to it seeing as i lost my last mp3 player (my friend gave me a replacement of the same model though) and i had to redo 3 assignments for college.

If you run Ubuntu, I can help you write the script if need be. It's definitely worth it, bro. I know from experience......

 

[BongWizard]

sounds like you overvolted the solid state memory... sorry to say, but in all my experience i'd have to say its dead and its not coming back :-(