Usb Help

Ok, I go this watch for christmas that has a two gigabyte flashdrive attached to it from This site. It came with a disk that had a program on it that lets you password protect it. I installed the program and did what the directions told me to do. Now It wont let me in, and it wants me to format the drive. So I try to format it and in the very first textbox, it says that there are only eight megabytes to work with. I ignored this, and clicked ok. It pretends to do something and then says that it cannot format it. I have uninstalled the software, and have uninstalled the whole flashdrive from my computer, and tried to fix the disk errors, but I still cannot get in. Is there a way to get into this or am I out a really nice watch?

Windows should be able to format it without any additional software.

Try formatting it via Windows.

Wait a minute - maybe it has been used and there really is only 8MB left - open it up in Windows and take a look - might be some goodies on it from someone who returned it.

Every time I right click it and click 'explore' or 'open' it asks me to reformat the drive, and every time I 'try' to reformat it, it says that it can't. It was a brand new watch, and I was able to open it up before I tried to use that password software.

Right click on it and select 'Properties'. Click 'Tools' and error check it. Allow Windows to fix errors and recover bad sectors.

That is what I meant by this. Sorry.

Mmm, must be a defective one.

Dang.

use the software you got with it to reset the watch, or reformat without any encryption. What might have happned is it came, or you formatted it, with a large 'secure' area, which is hidden, and only 8mb unsecure, which is what you can see.

To use the secure area you need to the software on each machine, which is a bit of a pain.

Are you using Vista, by any chance?

I get exactly the same problem with my mobile phone. Vista reckons the memory card needs to be formatted before I can use it, yet it works fine in the phone itself.

After its been hooked up to Vista, I have to switch the phone off and back on to get it working again.

How to fix? I don't know.

Nope, I am using xp, and I have two other flash drives, that I did not have to use that program on, and they work just fine.

Similar (ish) story, I got a watch with gps and stuff for data logging my training runs, after the first few downloads from it, the computer would recognise the fact that the watch was connected but failed to access the devices logs... I was initially concerned it'd developed a similar problem to my palm(i.e. never destined to connect via usb - I connect via serial now) although luckily the resolution was :-

1. Download new client software for the watch from garmin
2. Download new application software for PC

Hopefully you might be able to source some new driver software for your watch/PC that'll address your issues.

If you go to the windows disk management, do you see a large hidden partition in addition to the 8Mb one, by any chance?

If so, you may be able to just delete both the 8Mb and the hidden partition, create a single new partition, and format it as either NTFS or FAT32.
Many USB devices will only show the single primary partition to the OS when inserted, so a secondary partition might be hidden unless it loads special drivers from the primary partition first.

All those drop down boxes; that is the only option in each of them.

I probably know where it is, but where is windows disk management?

Google for 'HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool' -- it's exactly like the Windows format dialogue except that it will report and format the full size of a USB flash device rather than just the first partion. (It's really meant for HP devices, obviously, but it works fine with my non-HP sticks.)

two ways of getting there:

- right-click on 'my computer' and choose 'manage'
or:
- Control panel -> administrative tools -> Computer management

Then expand 'storage' and go to 'disk management'

Of course, if you make any changes there MAKE SURE that you are modifying the correct partition/device, or you'll mess up your other data in the process. Use at your own risk.