Hi,

I'm experiencing some mayor issues with a USB memorystick. Something strange happend to it while plugged into a SuSE 10.0 box. In some way the originally 2.0 Gb stick is now reported as 1 Tb. It's not that I mind the extra capacity, if the result of this was not that I now can no longer use the disk at all.

I have a feeling that it's caused by the fact that the cylinder size of the stick is now reported as 7.84 Mb (which can be too big) or the fact that the number of cylinders is now set to 133673 (which seems a bit too many).

Does anybody have a suggestion on how to fix this?

Many thanks in advance.

This usually happens when the flash memory is uncleanly removed (not unmounted). These devices use FAT/VFAT filesystems, and they are trivially easy to damage. Remember how often you had to run chkdisk with FAT on DOS/Windows?

The solution is usually the same. Plug in the device, but don't mount it. Run:

dosfsck -a -w /dev/sdxy

(where /dev/sdxy is the device name)

Alternatively, plug it into a Windows machine and run chkdisk on it.

Thanks. However, in the mean time I managed to destroy the USB stick even furthter. (Don't know how I did that but I guess it has something to do with my attempt to change the number of cylinders on the device using fdisk).

As a result it's now completely useless (doesn't see any media anymore at all, I even plugged it in a Windows machine, which asks me to insert media into the drive).

Anyway, the vendor has kindly agreed to send me a new USB stick, so I guess that takes care of the problem.