Corrupted Flash Drive

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Level 1

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Corrupted Flash Drive

Hi,

I recently bought an 8GB USB stick. Once I was running a program off of the flash drive on a windows computer and I did not eject it properly. Now when I connect the drive to a windows computer, and try to format it, it says the drive is write protected. The disk seems to be formatted as RAW

When I connect to a Mac, the disk is not recognized by Finder and only in Disk Utility. When I verify it:

It says

Verifying volume “disk3s1”

** /dev/disk3s1

Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: 000000

Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

but I can't repair or erase the disk. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Nov 6, 2012 2:31 PM

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Answer 1

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Limnos

Level 10

411,157 points

Nov 6, 2012 2:35 PM in response to a.z.p.

Unless something has changed since TigerOS I don't think any version of Disk Utility can repair drives formatted for Windows as I presume this one was if you were running Windows programs off it. You will have to use Windows to attempt a repair.

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Answer 2

a.z.p. Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 6, 2012 3:34 PM in response to Limnos

Sorry this did not solve my question. I accidentally said it did... Oops!

The drive was formatted as FAT 32 before the incident and I was able to access it from myac to and was running Mac applications off of it also

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Answer 3

Limnos

Level 10

411,157 points

Nov 6, 2012 10:16 PM in response to a.z.p.

FAT32 is really more of a Windows format though Macs can read and write to it. Again, to my knowledge even newer versions of Disk Utility will not repair FAT drives. It has to be done with Windows utilities.

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