How do I fix bad sectors on a flash drive?

DON'T give up on your Flash Drive if it has corrupted files!

One thing I've found, that may be a factor in disk errors on a Flash Drive, is the type of filesystem being used. Try a more primitive one!

Some Flash Drives are intolerant of NTFS, so try FAT32 instead. Some may also be intolerant of FAT32, so if even FAT32 doesn't work, try FAT16 (a.k.a. simply "FAT") instead. I found that one Flash Drive which regularly corrupted files, abruptly settled down and started behaving perfectly, after I reformatted and went from FAT32 to ordinary FAT. In either/any case, GOOD LUCK! :)

HP has a fee utility just for formatting flash drives. Worth a shot.

Packrat1947

i think i have a kind of same problem. i can see the flash in the my computer window. i can also see the files in it. but i cant open any of them, copy from or copy to the flash. And also i cant format it. Doing all these i see the CRC check error message. Any ideas?

My memory stick has falled; bad sector. Is there any way I can retrive the data I have on it before I through it out?

I am facing the quite similar problem with my FlashDrive.
In my case, whenever I copy any data it gets copied properly. But after sometime, the files get corrupted. Names of the files in the folder gets changed to something random.

I don't think its a virus as I have checked that.
Is it because of bad sectors? Is my problem exactly the same?

i hav got the bad sectors prob in ma flash drive.....does any one knows about the free utility to recover it....

If like me you don't want to let go of your flash drive and you know theres bad sectors on there somewhere maybe sourcing where these are specifically and partitioning the drive so the partition with the bad sectors you don't use, would that work im no techy expert so im asking you guys?

High end type probably have wear levelling, but then again they are probably quite reliable being high end. For these, it's likely the drive will become obsolete due to it's size long before the drive physically fails. We're talking here about low end stuff, not so great quality but cheap, and I'm sure that for the guys who produce it wear levelling is the last thing on their mind, but rather how to make it cheaper and reliable enough and get it out on the market ASAP so they can make some bucks before they need to produce a bigger size. So I think the issue is valid, for low end type of sticks that most likely don't have wear levelling, I'm sure you can mark the bad sectors and use quite safely what's left. And besides, without theorizing whether it has or not wear levelling, you can just go ahead and mark whatever bad sects you see, and if they keep popping up afterwards it means the stick does have wear levelling and this approach won't work. On the other hand, if I'm right, it will just work, and you'll get a reasonably reliable stick.

Leo, I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I read that the newer flash drives no longer "wear out". I suspect many of the people having these problems actually have "fake" sized flash drives, where you bought a 16 gb drive, but its really a 2 gb drive where its been modified to APPEAR as though its a 16 gb drive. Of course when you try to write 16 gb to it and read it back, only the first couple gb are correct, and the rest appears corrupted. A freeware program called h2wtest 1.4 can be downloaded to test for fake flash drives.

Now me, being the chap bugger that I am, and having gotten a refund for the 16 gb flashdrive I PAID for, *I* would like to MARK the other 14 gb and USE the 2 gb worth of chip that really is there. I would have been able to do this in the old days by creating files of the block size and then using a utility to identify the bad files, but I can't find any modern day utility to test and mark the bad areas. Any suggestions?

The technology behind flash memory still wears out - it's just getting better and thus lasts longer. But eventually it dies. I've never heard of or experienced the "fake" scenario you describe. Might run chkdsk /F /R on it, but if it's bad, it's risky to use at all and I'd discard it.

31-Mar-2010

I have a 8GB 2.5" form factor IDE flash disk formatted as FAT32 that has a 2 GB file that is critical to my work. I cannot read past about the 308MB mark with any utility I've tried. I need to recover as much data as possible from the rest of the file, but I haven't found a way to get at any of the rest of the data. In Windows the file transfer freezes when it gets to the 308MB mark and the disk must be forcefully removed before I can access it again at all (I have it mounted using a USB to IDE adapter).I have also tried it in a VxWorks RTOS system and tried transferring the file via FTP. Same result - fails at 308MB. I don't need the drive, just whatever is left of the data. I tried CHKDSK /r and it froze and never finished. CHKDSK /f said some bad File Allocation Tables detected. I tried creating an image using Acronis True Image 11 and it freezes at the same point, even with "ignore bad sectors" option set. Any other tools that you think might help?

If it's a flash drive, then no, I don't have any ideas. I believe you may be out of luck.

08-Apr-2010

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