My First Flash Drive I Ever Bought Stopped Working On Windows

[ERD50]

... Back then, anything that stored a few floppies worth was big. I was still using 100MB IOmega ZIP drive. Anyone remembers that? I still have it upstairs somewhere.

I got rid of my Zip drive in our move 2.5 years ago (donated it I think? or gave it away to someone still using them). One of the few things I was an early adopter of, I read positive reviews and bought one shortly after they came out. In a world of 1.44MB floppies, 100MB R/W was a life/time-saver - I could have a complete clone of my Mac on there, and boot from it in an emergency (which I had to do once - my hard drive got corrupted somehow, and I just used the Zip drive for a week or so, until I had time to work on the problem).

It's mind-boggling how cheap/available storage is - I've got more memory just siting around unused than I could ever dream of back in those days, even at 1,000's of time the price.

-ERD50

 

[NW-Bound]

Dang, I just remember about the DAT backup tape. Both drives and tape cartridges were expensive.

Can't bear to throw them out. Still upstairs somewhere.

And the other forms of tape backup too. I forgot the name. Dang, I am getting old.

PS. I remember now. Travan tapes. All upstairs, in boxes in a spare bedroom.

 

[ERD50]

Yeah, it probably will work if you use it on an old Win95 or NT machine.

I wonder if even Linux still has a driver for it.

IIRC, Zip was just a standard "Mass Storage Device" (at least for the USB version, I forget if the early ones had a different I/O?), Mac and Linux had those drivers built in, I don't think anything else was needed. Windows always seemed to want to load drivers for everything, I never understood that.

OK, wiki says all the 100MB Zips had USB, so that should work w/o drivers in Linux, I'm pretty sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

-ERD50

 

[Ian S]

I have an old flash drive of roughly the same vintage but 128 MB. It still works but it was empty; I wish I'd left files on it to see if they were still usable. The oldest solid state media I have with something on it is a 32 MB SmartMedia card. It was for a Rio One mp3 player and the mp3 files on it still play properly. It and the files are about 20 years old. The SmartMedia card probably hasn't been in a reader in 15 years. I have some 20 y.o. CompactFlash cards that still work too. Flash media - at least the older stuff - seems quite robust as long as you are not writing to it constantly.

 

[Ian S]

Yep, still have mine with maybe 20 disks. I "think" it would still work if I wanted to try it... It's at least 25+ years old, IIRC.

I may have tossed mine before the latest move. Probably the disks too.

 

[Ian S]

Yeah, it probably will work if you use it on an old Win95 or NT machine.

All it required was a parallel port so Windows XT would be fine too.

 

[NW-Bound]

IIRC, Zip was just a standard "Mass Storage Device" (at least for the USB version, I forget if the early ones had a different I/O?), Mac and Linux had those drivers built in, I don't think anything else was needed. Windows always seemed to want to load drivers for everything, I never understood that.

OK, wiki says all the 100MB Zips had USB, so that should work w/o drivers in Linux, I'm pretty sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

-ERD50

ZIP drive with USB? Mine predated the USB, now that I have thought about it.

All it required was a parallel port so Windows XT would be fine too.

Yes. Parallel port interface. Thank you. Did you mean Win XP? Still need a driver.

And I also had a couple of LS120 drives. Holy mackerel. Still upstairs, somewhere. Drives and disks.

 

[Ian S]

Yes. Parallel port interface. Thank you. Did you mean Win XP?

Yes, I meant XP.

 

[Sojourner]

My local MicroCenter (computer/parts/supply store) has a promotion once or twice a year where they give each customer a free 128GB USB 3.0 flash drive just for coming into the store. These days, I wouldn't bother with anything much less than that unless it already had valuable data on it that I wanted to save. That said, I totally understand the techno-geek urge that's driving OP to figure this out. I have some old Jaz drive cartridges that I'd love to revive somehow, but they are so obsolete that I don't know if it's worth the hassle.

 

[NW-Bound]

Here's something to knock youse guys socks off.

I still have a full-height 5-1/4" floppy drive that could format a 360K double-side floppy to 720K. Recall that back then you either had a single-sided 180K drive, or a standard double-sided 360K drive. Then, IBM came out with the high-density 1.2MB floppy for the IBM AT. This required a better disk with different magnetic media, as I recall.

So, what is this 720K format? Electrically, it's the same as the 360K. However, the head stepping is halved, so it is capable of 80 tracks instead of 40 tracks. Double the capacity, using the same cheap media.

This drive format was never popular. I picked this up at a surplus store some time in the 80s because it was cheap. Then, wrote a driver for it, and even pushed the stepper to 84 tracks, plus programmed the controller to reduce intersector gaps so that I could cram 10 sectors onto a track instead of the standard 9.

Ta da! My own floppy format of 840K, all using low-density disks instead of the more expensive 1.2MB disk.

Of course, this Shugart floppy drive is still upstairs.

In my driver, I even cached the FAT sectors to speed up write operations. This was typically done only on hard disks. It was only later with the 3.5" floppy that MS-DOS started to cache the FAT.

 

[easysurfer]

I'm poking around some more (more than I should have), my conclusion is the problem is a Win 10 issue. The message I get is saying that a device doesn't exist (Of course, it does exit, just that Win 10 is lost can't find it. I've seen some tips on how to fix but at best, only fixed temporarily.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...fied-usb/590230ad-17ae-4f33-a048-63a3ebf305f6

Think I'm going to put a label on the thumb drive as use on Linux only. Now if only I could get my morning back .

The moral of the story is good thing I keep backups. I had important information on the flash drive but got backups of the data elsewhere. So, no harm, no foul except lost time poking around.

 

[5Miler]

I am constantly using my USB drives to load Linux distros and messing around in Windows so occasionally the format gets set in Linux (efat) and I actually get the partitions so messed up I can't reformat in Windows. Often the file space shows as a fraction of what it should be. I use Windows to fix the partitions using the following steps.

https://www.howtogeek.com/235824/ho...drive-to-fix-partition-and-capacity-problems/

Worth a shot as it only takes a few minutes.

 

[easysurfer]

I am constantly using my USB drives to load Linux distros and messing around in Windows so occasionally the format gets set in Linux (efat) and I actually get the partitions so messed up I can't reformat in Windows. Often the file space shows as a fraction of what it should be. I use Windows to fix the partitions using the following steps.

https://www.howtogeek.com/235824/ho...drive-to-fix-partition-and-capacity-problems/

Worth a shot as it only takes a few minutes.

Thanks for the link to the very good instructions.

I tried, and things seemed to work. But after a couple of safely removes and mounting again of the cleaned and formatted flash drive, WIN 10 gets lost again and says device doesn't exist.

Oh well, glad I tried.

 

[NW-Bound]

Perhaps the short amount of time it worked with Windows was because the drive is getting flakier and flakier.

For the enquiring mind, would one see the same behavior on Linux? Say, you format it with Linux, then keep moving 256MB worth of files in/out of the drive. How long until Linux throws up its hands and say drive no good?

 

[easysurfer]

Perhaps the short amount of time it worked with Windows was because the drive is getting flakier and flakier.

For the enquiring mind, would one see the same behavior on Linux? Say, you format it with Linux, then keep moving 256MB worth of files in/out of the drive. How long until Linux throws up its hands and say drive no good?

I don't think so. But I'm not going to test as the flashdrive [-]wasted[/-] used up enough of my time already. I say I don't think so because not once can I remember any odd behavior with that drive and Linux.

Seems from what I read, it's a WIN 10 and 11 issue. Perhaps just too old for WIN to mess with as the drive is probably 1st gen USB. When I bought that I felt like a king. A whole 256 MB on a flash drive. Life was good .

 

[NW-Bound]

But you got me curious now.

Is it the 1st time you use this drive with Win 10/11, or it just started to act up recently?

PS. I just looked on the shelf, and lo-and-behold, I saw a PNY 256MB flash drive laying there. I think my mother gave it to me to get some photos off it for her. Have not touched it in years.

Just plugged it into the laptop I am surfin' the Web with. Seems to work fine. Hey, what's this 2021 tax return doing here? I lied about not using it. Apparently, I used it as a sneaker net to take the return to my wife's PC to print.

The desktop I prepared the tax return is Win 10. This laptop is Win 11.

 

[easysurfer]

But you got me curious now.

Is it the 1st time you use this drive with Win 10/11, or it just started to act up recently?

I say from memory, I used before on Win 10 and it was unreadable before. I was able to reformat and thinking I fixed and put away. I can't say 100% as my memory isn't the best these days.

But I didn't use the flash drive all the time. I used it to store among other things, digital QR codes for my authenticator app as a backup. A good thing I have the codes backed elsewhere as I knew enough to not put all eggs in one basket. I only used yesterday as I added a QR code but noticed the drive was unreadable. I've updated in the past, I'd say with WIN 10 too without issue.

But reading, looks like the device doesn't exist situation in WIN 10/11 is not brand new.

 

[SecondCor521]

But reading, looks like the device doesn't exist situation in WIN 10/11 is not brand new.

It's almost certainly not a priority for Microsoft to get current Windows versions to work with hardware that old. It sounds like they got it "sorta working" with one of their old USB drives and called it good enough.

I don't know the USB protocol handshakes for a device to show up on the bus. But I did work on SSDs and we basically had a compatibility lab which was full of different laptops and desktops from all different manufacturers. The testing team would put our new SSDs under development into all these different machines, install Windows, transfer files, and do all that sort of stuff to make sure that we were compatible with everyone. Occasionally we'd find issues either with our drives or with the host systems (if the latter, we would work with the host manufacturer to help them fix their system). I don't ever recall finding a compatibility bug in Windows itself.

In theory, there are timing and voltages and signals all laid out in the protocol spec somewhere, and in theory both hosts and devices are supposed to meet the spec and everything should just work. Sometimes for various reasons devices will make it to market that don't meet the spec, and that can cause issues but they can also "sorta work" sometimes or even most of the time. I recall discussions in the realm of compatibility where there were debates over how the spec should be understood; those misunderstandings can easily creep into implementations (especially with new specs).

So it's possible that your USB drive violates the spec just a bit, but was accommodated by the various hosts. Or perhaps Win 10/11 doesn't fully comply with the host side of the spec but "nobody" cares because "nobody" has drives that old any more. (There's quite possibly a low priority defect logged against Windows for this issue it sounds like. With a product the size of Windows, they can't fix all of the bugs so they prioritize and fix the most severe.)

 

[easysurfer]

Here is more on the no device error:

Fortunately, you can take some effective steps to eliminate this problem. However, before that, you must ensure the following things:

Restart your PC and see if it helps.
Update Windows to the latest version.
Make sure the disk drive has no internal damage.
Find and repair any bad sectors of your disks. You can consider using these bad sector repair tools.
Make sure that the USB port or SAT cable, or motherboard has no faults.
Update the motherboard chipset drivers to the latest version. Consider using Outbyte Driver Updater in this case.

https://windowsreport.com/a-device-which-does-not-exist-was-specified/

No luck for me.

Also, I think the "Update Windows to the latest version" is the cause in the first place.

My solution was to put a label of "Linux Only" on the thumbdrive to remind myself .

 

[ERD50]

OK, we have to see this through

I got curious, and found this linux command:

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/badblocks.8.html

sudo badblocks -vsw /dev/sda1 -o /badblocks.out

I'm sure you are aware, make 100% sure to replace "sda1" with the current address of the flash drive in question. The '-w' is a data-destructive test (-n is non-destructive, I guess it must re-write the data as it goes?).

I'm running it on one of mine as a test, but I grabbed a 64 GB one, that's 30 minutes in and 57% done...

Still 0/0/0 errors, so I'm assuming the bad blocks found during mfg/formatting are totally blocked out and are not part of the xx GB that would be tested? This would only be bad blocks since that time?

-ERD50

 

[NW-Bound]

That Windows fail to recognize that a USB device is plugged into the computer, I have seen times and times again on my various computers, but not lately. It started to happen long before Win 10/11.

What is maddening is that it happens randomly. Quite often, detaching and re-inserting the USB drive will work.

It could be all due to hardware that is on edge, either the computer or the drive, and not the software as SecondCor said. In a lab with full instrumentation, i.e. scope and logic analyzer, software tracer/debugger, they would be able to tell exactly how the trouble occurs.

But most times, we are left just scratching our head, emit a few curse words and move on.

 

[easysurfer]

In my PC's situation, the computer with WIN10 recognizes the USB in that I can do the safely remove. The drive may even show up after I do wiping out and reformatting or changing drive letter. But then after a few uses of safely removing, system gets lost again and then the device doesn't exist situation happens again.

I believe the technical term for what's happening is "PC acts flakey" with that flashdrive. If it was a 4TB HDD or something, I'd worry and try to figure out. But since it's a 256MB flashdrive, the "Why should I really care?" (except as a riddle) kind of applies.

 

[jim584672]

Never tell Windows to fix your drive. I foolishly did and it wiped out several chunks of data, there goes three music albums. Good thing I back up religiously.

 

[SecondCor521]

Still 0/0/0 errors, so I'm assuming the bad blocks found during mfg/formatting are totally blocked out and are not part of the xx GB that would be tested? This would only be bad blocks since that time?

USB flash drives might do things a bit differently, but in our SSDs we would do an initial R/W test for several hours on each new drive and any bad blocks would be marked "factory bad" and would never even be seen by the operating system.

The operating system could do it's own little R/W test if it wanted during a format command, and that might add a block or two, which would be marked bad in the FAT or whatever they call it.

SSDs can actually also detect blocks going bad, do error recovery, move the data on the fly behind the scenes, and mark the "going bad" block bad without the host even knowing.

I obviously can't tell for sure, but I doubt it's a bad block issue with the USB stick based on the symptoms. If it were a bad block, you'd probably get a Windows error message about a file being corrupt, or something; the drive would still show up as a device.

Some of the handshake stuff I alluded to before is timing-dependent, and that timing in turn can depend on resistors and capacitors on the device. With a device that old, it wouldn't surprise me if one of those popcorn parts went bad and now the timing is marginal. That'd be my guess.

 

[NW-Bound]

USB flash drives might do things a bit differently, but in our SSDs we would do an initial R/W test for several hours on each new drive...

I figured so.

And hard drive makers would do the same thing. And that's even more impressive, because these multi-TB drives take forever to read and write to, being so cavernous in capacity. It takes a few hours for each pass.

How do these guys make any money selling these wonderful things for so cheap? Amazing.