How to Fix an Unusable ‘Geek Squad’ Flash Drive

formattingusb-flash-drive

I have this brand new flash drive "geek squad" brand that is unusable, I've tried to format it on windows and mac without luck (I just cannot do it neither using the terminal nor via GUI) so I was trying to use a low level formating tool but it won't appear there to be formatted, any other ideas? besides going and try to get my money back.

EDIT

I noticed it has some sort of U3 program installed, don't know how that might help

Best Answer

I managed to format a belligerent partition on a friend's flash drive. Normal methods would not work because as far as the (Windows) OS knew, it was an unwritable CDFS CD-ROM partition:

These tools allowed me to remove the CDFS partition:

  1. USBDeview to see flash vendor ID, this can be found http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usbdeview.zip
  2. If your flash is SMI chip, you need SMI UFD utility, which can be found http://ftp.usboffice.kr/files/SMI_UFD_Utility.zip
  3. If your flash is USBEST chip, you need UCDexec.exe, which is http://ftp.usboffice.kr/files/UCDExec.exe

Here is little forum about it http://blog.usboffice.kr/?p=146

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