Low-Level Format For a USB Flash Drive?

Luyseyal writes "I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively. I have a USB flash card reader that will read/write the current one at USB 1.0 speed, but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting." Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?

How banal...

[Anonymous Coward]

The typical ask Slashdot articles of late:

Dear Slashdot,

Something brown just fell out of my butt and it smells really bad. What should I do?

Ridiculous

[phantomcircuit]

That's ridiculous. A-DATA sells crap. Reformatting will not change that.

RTFM

[Sponge Bath]

Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?

Spell: Resurrection
Level: 7
Range: Touch
Duration: Instantaneous

Best format tool ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Best format tool for these AData cards is http://www.canadiantire.ca/AST/browse/6/Tools/HandTools/Hammers/PRD~0574014P/Stanley%252BFatMax%252BBrick%252BHammer.jsp?locale=en

Re:RTFM

[Donniedarkness]

He said "low-level", which I suppose is what's getting you confused. I know it's subjective, but to be considered "low-leveled" for me, it'd have to be under level 5.

Haven't done a LLF in a while, but...

[Dahan]

Here's what I used to use for a low-level format:

A>debug
g=c800:5

If you've got a fairly speedy machine, set the interleave to 1:1. Don't forget to input the list of bad blocks so the drive won't try to store data in them. There's some more info in this KB article [microsoft.com]

HTH, HAND

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the microwave. That sometimes works.

Re:The official utility, perhaps?

[SEWilco]

You missed the point. He has shatty hardware. Best advice is to buy another one.

Best advice is to buy a bunch of them, plug them into a sufficiently large USB hub, put it in a waterproof box, and configure it as a RAID USB device.

Re:Ridiculous

[Bing Tsher E]

You can buy coprolite [wikipedia.org] (fossilized dinosaur shit) at rock shops. Put it in your rock tumbler.

You stole the second one?

[Hognoxious]

I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively

You stole the second one?

Re:A Serious Linux Bug

[Dogtanian]

man fsck.msdos

Yeah, I hated that kludgey old OS too...

Re:RTFM

[bensode]

Low level ... but might bring forth the zombie apocalypse ...

Animate Dead
Level: Clr 3, Death 3, Sor/Wiz 4
Range: Touch
Targets: One or more corpses touched