Formatting my flash Voyager

[Bashful2]

Hi My name is Duncan and i have a question :) I have a memory stick, a corsair flash voyager usb 2.0 256mb. i have had it a while now and i kept some music on it and some pics and i played it through my cigarette lighter in the car. Everything was working ok till one day i plugged it into my computer and now it keeps saying it needs foramtting and it wont play anymore, I cannot access any of the files and i ttried to format it using the disk utillity that came with it but it just says formatting failed...can you help me sort this thanks

[True Blue]

Hey Duncan,

 

It sounds like your flash memory has reached the end of its life. All flash memory has a certain and usually fairly predictable amount of times you can “flash” the gates (a.k.a. transistors). If you’ve had it for a while and/or used it very much, I suspect the gates have reached their flash limit and are “burnt out”. I have had the exact same thing happen several times with usb flash drives in the past. I’m sorry to say, I don’t know of any way to recover the data either. You might be able to get one last “breath” out of it by plugging it into another computer, but be prepared to copy your data to something else immediately if you do get it to read that one last time.

 

Edit: Hey Duncan, I just found this on a different thread in this forum. It’s an old post from Yellowbeard that explains how to use an old format utility to revive your flash drive. I read through it and it’s definitely legit and worth a try. Be aware though, if this works, you will lose any data still remaining on your flash drive. If your only goal is just to be able to use it again, and you're not concerned about wiping any existing data off it, this is definitely worth a try.

 

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=62742