My stupid Kingston USB Flash Drive broke

Bought it just before Christmas, 4Gb. Copied some files onto it, it seemed fine. Tried it today and it's write protected even though there is no write protect switch on the device nor any option via windows to write protect it. Tried it on XP, Vista and MacOS. How annoying.

Problem is I can't return it to the supplier because the source code cannot be made public, and it's sitting on the drive read-only so I can't clean it off (and the drive cannot be formatted). Gah!

Bugger me, thats a pickle.. How much did it set you back?

Could send it to BFG and tell them it was an expense of writing the game? X-D

Oh it didn't cost much, like £12 or something. It's just annoying how unreliable flash drives seem to be (or maybe it's just cheap ones), also it's a waste of my time and time is important to me.

I'm surprised. Kingston is supposed to be good quality. Never had a drive break on me all these years.

yeah, Kingston are usually great! :-(

i got a tesco (technika) 4gb mp3 player and after a week or 3 it refused to talk to my pc so im stuck with the songs and files stored on it
then it started to develop a glitch where songs now sound like they are played on ff (always the same songs not some randomness)

i was going to get another and play swapsies as ive had it a while now so the recipt is lost
"i bought this 3 days ago and now its buggered can i have my money back" sounds better than "i got this ages ago"

then i kinda couldnt be bothered and am getting an ipod (only cos its the only 160bg ive found i can buy in a shop)

I thought Kingston would be OK too, not mega cheap but not top o' the range either.

If they check the serials, they'll know. so make sure you chose the scruffy spotty-faced school-leaver kid in the corner.

Did you plug-in the flash disk "deep" enough?

yep. It does go in a long way, that's true.

I had similar problem with one of those portable mp4 players where it had become read-only. I deleted the partition on it and recreated it with the partition management tool in XP. After doing that I was then able to format it and everything was okay again. Never had any problems with it since then. I don't know if a usb stick turns up in partition management tools, but it's worth a try before you ditch it.

I think it is bad luck. I have PNY 4GB from PC World 3 weeks ago for £17.99

Do you always make backup?

Yes they do. and in fact, that reminds me, I had a sony MemoryStick do this to me, i had to destroy the partitino as someone said above. try it Grey. :-)

Yeah, there's nothing critical on the stick at all.

OK I'll try the partion manager thing.

There delete option in Dish Management is dimmed out :-( Can't remove the partition. Can't format it (says it's write protected).

Try using the 'Change Drive Letter and Paths' option in Disk Management to assign it a different letter. You might be able to delete the partition and/or format it then.

Always make two backup, one for flash memory disk and other reliable backup that you trust..eg backup hard drive(having two hard drive is good things..so u have one souce code in hard drive backup and other u got flash memory disk backup too and if your flash memory is FOOK then U got second hard drive backup to help you). IT seem lesson for you to learn in the future not to make same mistake Twice. :)

I read Klingon for some reason :o)

I got a technika DVD player from Tesco. Unfortunately, it would only play about the first hour of any DVD I put in it.

So I took it back and got a good one. Pay cheap money, you get cheap crap.

when I was in the market for a new USB flash drive, I ende dup going with a 2GB one -- I read a lot of reviews, and the newegg.com comment sections were completely full of people with various Big Brand (tm) 4GB drives that experienced massive file corruption problems once they exceeded 2GB... Not just one or two, but half the comments were people complaining about those problems... I ended up going with one of the 2 GB versions which got much better reviews, and haven't run into any problems myself. :-?

I have 4GB Flash memory drive and let hope mine doesnt go corruptions if does eceeded over 2GB

May want to do a google search for the make/model of your flash drive combined with 'corruption' or something... :-?

a side note in relation to my above post about my duff mp3 and migrating to ipod

got one yesterday
what gives with the fing thing
all my albums are
album name-track number.mp3
and some track title too

but on the ipod its just aabd.mp3 ajff.mp3
most NORMAL players let you just drag and drop and it will do the rest

It sounds like the FS has got corrupted and is protecting itself for some reason. Try running a diagnostic program on it. If that fails as a last resort try removing and recreating the partition/reformat. If windows wont let you delete the partition then try a linux live cd like ubuntu. That deletes protected partitions (like those damn EISA ones!:) .

- Have you pulled it out without stopping it first? If so, BAD idea, I know loads of people who have canned USB memory by doing that (even killed one or two myself). Always stop it first before removal (to prevent delayed write problems) have not broken one since (touch wood :)

Am I the only one who sees the irony here of posting all about it on a forum?

Yep did that properly (wonder how many people don't)

Good one ;-) I guess I'm willing to waste some time on certain things (like forums).

As an IT engineer who does the dreaded "deskside support" sometimes, all i can say is you would be amazed, you name it, mem sticks, cameras, phones, mp3 players, pdas, usb hdds etc that people just shove in and rip out (and then moan they have lost it all or its not working anymore :)

Ive got a sandisk 4 gigger for a while that i use very regulary for work. It jets knocked about on my keyring and has been to capacity many times. No problems to report yet.