Hello, Earlier today when a friend at a MacBook asked me today, "hey can I borrow your flash drive, mine isn't working in this CrapBook?" I obliviously lent him first one of mine, then, when it didn't work, the other which worked (I safely removed neither, but I also had nothing running/open on them at the time). When I got to a friend's house later today I plugged both into his computer (Windows 7). Nothing. He rebooted to Ubuntu Linux. Nothing. I went home, confused, and tried them on my Wndows 7. After the "bing!" I got the message, "USB device not recognised". Checked Disk Management, nothing shows up. I'm about to reboot to Ubuntu, but I suspect I will have similar results. Here are some stats of the flash drives (both are identical, bought at the same time): Brand: Apacer Capacity: 16GB Format: fat32 Any ideas/suggestions/anything? Much appreciated.
Boot to Ubuntu with the flash drive(s) connected to the system. Once you're booted up, open an xterm window and run the command "ls /dev | grep sd" (w/o the ""). This should give you a list of all the disk drives (not optical) the computer sees, eg sda, sda1, sda2, sdb, sdb1, sdc...etc. Each of those without the number are the locations of the physical drives while the numbers are the partitions on those drives, sda1 is C:, sda2 is D, sdb1 is E:, the last one(s) will generally be the flash drive(s). If there isn't an entry that should correspond with your flash drive running the command lspci will give you the rundown of what your system detected during boot, you can PM it to me if it doesn't make any sense, otherwise opening the drive in gparted (not sure how you do this as I don't have a linux machine with a gui at the moment and generally use cfdisk from the CLI) will tell you what filesystem it has and allow you to repartition it if necessary.
Hello, Thanks for the detailed reply munkey. However, I have already tried most/all of those things, and unfortunately the drives are not detected at all in Linux. Anything I can do? Thanks.
Sounds like the flash drives are dead but for some reason it says that the usb device is not recognized? Sounds like something went bad in the flash drives.
Hello, I'm really hoping they are not dead, but it is looking that way. I am very confused as to how this could have happened... I never knew MacBooks were such vicious murderers! Both drives are only a couple of months old and they did have some important stuff on them, so it would really suck if they are dead just like that. Might a warranty cover something like that? Thanks.
If they don't show up in lspci or as something other than what they are then I would definitely say they are dead. Just using them on another computer (even if it is a mac) shouldn't damage them but some people just have bad luck with technology.
Hello, It just completely befuddles me... I mean I plugged one it, 20 seconds later, pulled it out. Plugged the other in, copied something small to it, 30 seconds later, pulled it out. I just can't see what could have happened in that time to seemingly completely kill them both. Could not safely removing them do something like that? And the weird thing is, when I plug them into my Windows 7, they do make a pop-up saying unrecognised USB, which is more than Ubuntu shows... Thanks.
Removing them without ejecting them or using the safely remove hardware app shouldn't cause any physical damage, however it can cause damage to the filesystem if it was not dismounted properly, though when that happens the error is generally recoverable.
From what I gather from your story: Your external hard drives both work Your friends hard drive doesn't You plug one of yours into your friend's mac and now it doesn't work You plug a second one into his mac it works but subsequently doesn't work While not impossible its a large coincidence that three hard drives which have been plugged into the same mac have all failed. Maybe there is an electrical fault in the mac. The only thing I can think of would be to disassemble the externals and plug the hard disks into the sata ports on your computer bypassing the usb circuitry. This will probably void any warranty but you could get your data back which may not happen if you send them back under warranty. After that if your data is really important then you could be looking at a professional data recovery service which costs an arm and a leg.
