Flash drive

A person bought a flash drive, which does not work properly and asked me to have a look at it, it keeps asking to format once i take it out of the usb port, and put it back in. Another thing is once i have copied movies to it the movies wont play it say’s (cant render the file). I used a program in hirens to format to fat32 twice!!! and not quick format either. Does anyone know whats wrong or a suggestion to whats other program i should use?

If it does that in every computer you try it, it needs to go back to the retailer.

There was a huge flood of defective flash memory products dumped on the market, usually sold through ebay by anonymous sellers that suddenly disappear. I suspect they came from a trash dumpster in some factory somewhere. I was scammed by one of these once, having very similar issues. Considering my time was of value, I figured the cheapest thing to do was just destroy it, to make sure it didn’t get trashpicked yet again, causing the same problems for someone else.

See if you can change the flash drive to operate in MSC mode. That may solve your problem. MTP mode won’t let the computer take control of the device, which is why it may keep trying to format the thing unsuccessfully.

Those don’t even make it to the dumpster. The people who work at the factories in China & India just take the bins of defective ones & sell them.

Your drive may not be defective but made to show a fake size.

eBay is full of this, and eBay loves successful merchants.

For example your drive may be advertised to have 4GB but in reality it may only have 256MB. Thus if you write more than it’s actual size you’ll have problems like missing or corrupted files. Look for and download a tool called H2testw. Test your drive with it and you’ll see it’s true size.