USB 4gig drive
 

I know i should have unmounted it first but....being fairly new i forgot and just pulled it out, now my 4gig shows 8meg!
I ran dmesg and it sees both 4gig and 8meg but does not come up on desktop. I even put it in my friends Xp to try to format it but it can't, although i can see and open it in explorer.
I've tried to mount it ...no luck.
Any ideas before i throw it in the bin and put it down to the learning curve.

Try using testdisk to fix the partition table. Beyond that, I'd try shredding the drive (shred -f -n=1 /dev/sdxx -- of course use the right device -- shred will overwrite the data block by block). Then try to reformat it with GParted or fdisk.

Hi pljvaldez,

Tried the testdisk...no luck only seeing 8mg
shred coming up with the following

shred: =1: invalid number of passes

Dave.

Sorry, it should be shred -f -n 1 /dev/sdxx without the equal sign.

As for testdisk, did you run through trying to recover the partition table?

pljvaldez

testdrive coming back with:
Disk /dev/sdf - 8388 KB / 8192 KiB - CHS 1024 1 16
Analyse cylinder 6/1023: 00%

and shred saying
shred: /dev/sdf: fdatasync failed: Input/output error

Hmmm. You can try dd directly. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf bs=512 count=1 which should overwrite the drive with zeros.

You can also try using dosfsck -a /dev/sdf. It's a bit like running scandisk on the drive.

hi,

Thats what i think could have happend to my USB,
it used to be 1 gig now it under 50 mb.
I can not remember ever unmounting it : (