Cruzer thumb drives not working

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Hi all.

 My cruzer 8GB flash drive stopped working a couple of days ago. I initally thought it was a fauty unit but it works in two other laptops and a desktop. I have borrowed a friends Cruzer blade 32 GB and that doesnt get recognized either. Im asuming there is a bug in my system but i have no idea how to find it. Im running windows 7. Any help will be greatly appriciated

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@darthmilo wrote:

Hi all.

 My cruzer 8GB flash drive stopped working a couple of days ago. I initally thought it was a fauty unit but it works in two other laptops and a desktop. I have borrowed a friends Cruzer blade 32 GB and that doesnt get recognized either. Im asuming there is a bug in my system but i have no idea how to find it. Im running windows 7. Any help will be greatly appriciated

Revert back to XP. :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously though, there are literally hundreds of posts like yours here lookiing for help with un-recognized flash drives. What do they all have in common? Windows 7.

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I just wont be buying any more sandisk products. Why is it just one make. Every other one ive tried works fine. The other laptop i tried them on is a windows 7

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" it works in two other laptops and a desktop. I have borrowed a friends Cruzer blade 32 GB and that doesnt get recognized either. Im asuming there is a bug in my system but i have no idea how to find it. Im running windows 7. Any help will be greatly appriciated "

I suspect your system’s AV / AM app(s) are treating the device as a potential threat.

“Why is it just one make. Every other one ive tried works fine.”

I suspect the other makes don’t have preinstalled software like the Cruzer does.

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I can see them both in device manager but they dont show up in my computer. Id have thought if it was my anti virus id have got a warning message first or at least a log of it. They both worked until about four days ago. Im going to do a system restore in case its an automatic update issue

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“They both worked until about four days ago. Im going to do a system restore in case its an automatic update issue”

Windows shouldn’t have had an update at this point but AVs do and I’m not sure System Restore backs those updates out.

Keep us posted as to your results.

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I had a problem after formatting my 16gb cruzer, it showed up as a removable drive in windows disk management but wouldn’t mount as a drive. I formatted with the Mac twice and no change. So I figured my windows PC needed the USB reset (http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/usb-drive-or-flash-problems-how-to-cleanup-and-remove-old-usb-storage-drivers.145884/) its a useful tool even if it doesn’t fix your issue. after I reset my USB though, it didn’t change anything, so I remembered I had a good utility from HP.  (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/HP-USB-Disk-Storage-Format-Tool.shtml ) HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (you have to run as admin or it will tell you to do so.) Formatted the drive back to NTFS and the drive is working perfectly again.

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@brandontobbon wrote:

 

Formatted the drive back to NTFS and the drive is working perfectly again.

 

That’s odd, given they come formatted as FAT32 from the factory. :confounded:

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well i never said factory defaults, but my steps work, REGARDLESS of filesystem.

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I wasn’t implying what you did didn’t work. Only that all flash drives are formatted as FAT32 as it’s the optimal filesytem for these type of drives. The fact that it works in NTFS and not FAT32 is bewildering.

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now i understand what you mean, but i agree, and another issue i did run into, if i format using windows disk management my cruzer will have an MBR and basically a second partition for the actual storage of the drive… not sure if that even makes sense. but i was doing a recovery on a friends mac (i do not own one myself) and needed to create a usb install from his recovery dvd because it was a bit scratched and if its not perfectly clean, mac’s do not read them so well. well i noticed it had an MBR for the drive so i decided to format using disk utility on mac and it still contained MBR for 1st partition and then HFS+ filesystem for the actual storage or 2nd partition (remember though its still only 1 partition so its a virtual volume) so i used MacDrive8 in windows and that happened to remove it completely and now the entire contents are HFS+ with an EFI boot now instead of MBR. pretty crazy experience i had with that. failed install about 30 times before everything went perfect.

i do have another competitors usb drive but i believe my cruzer was built better. the other drive when copying a single 7gb file will go from 60 to 30 and then down to 2MB/s data transfer speeds. when i use my cruzer its a solid 30 MB/s every time

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“The fact that it works in NTFS and not FAT32 is bewildering.”

To say the least. :confounded:

" if i format using windows disk management my cruzer will have an MBR and basically a second partition for the actual storage of the drive… not sure if that even makes sense."

In that Windows only sees the 1st partition on removable drives, no it doesn’t  make sense. 

The MBR is a record on the drive, in it’s own space, that points to the Partition Table which in turn points to the partitions on the drive.

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Cruzer thumb drives not working 4 gb