I have a strange problem. A guy I work with was backing up a 4Gig directory of photos using VISTA onto a 16Gig memory stick. It got to about 2G (the old FAT16 limit) and stopped with a message that the stick was write protected (it doesn't have a write protect switch, its formatted as FAT32). The stick shows up on windows VISTA, XP, 7 , OSX 10.6/10.7 and HPUX11 as a read only device and nothing I've tried lets me change that (access control lists included) He's happy for me to reformat it to get back a useable usb drive, but none of my systems seem to want to touch it.

Anyone else had this, and how did you sort it?

Thanks for any ideas
Hugh

Are you sure the computer isn't saying it's write protected because it can't write to it IE it's FUBARd?

That may well be true, but hopefully someone will come up with something I haven't seen or heard of before. You can see all the files it did copy to the stick, and open them/copy from the stick. Since its a 16G stick, I wouldnt be surprised to find its 8 blocks of 2G, and something nasty has broken internally.
Regards
Hugh

Is it a new stick - if so it might well be a fake 16 Gig stick with only 2 gig really available.

any chance its a HP memory stick? there was a problem with a batch of them going write protected. HP released a patch to fix it.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ivan
Is it a new stick - if so it might well be a fake 16 Gig stick with only 2 gig really available.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Fatgadget

quote:

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Originally posted by Ivan
Is it a new stick - if so it might well be a fake 16 Gig stick with only 2 gig really available.

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Thanks for the help. Its a memorex one and does show up as 16G. I have now convinced myself it broken.
Regards
Hugh

obvious things first...

The memory stick doesnt have a write protect tab physically on the device does it?

if your sure it doesnt and your happy to lose the data that is stored on it do the following

(presuming your using windows 7, its not much different for XP or vista)

1. click start

2. right click on computer and select Manage

3. under storage click disk management (wait while it loads), you should now see a list of disks available

4. you should now see all disks on your computer including any removable storage

5. in the top half of the screen, you will see the drive letter that corresponds to your Flash Drive, lets pretend its E: (yours could be anything)

6. scroll down in the bottom half of the screen and you will find volume E: and details about it something like MYPENDRIVE (E: ) 16GB Healthy (primary partition

7. Right click and select Delete Volume read dialouge box and click yes (you might get another dialog box depending if something is accessing the drive, again cread it and click yes). You have now removed the parition from the drive

8. Right Click the drive again, select new simple volume

9. click next, Windows will now automatically try to use all available space on the pen drive, but check its trying to use the max disk space and click next

10. pick a drive letter and click next

11. choose a file system, give the drive a name (as standard its New Volume), untick peform quick format so we can get it to sort of check the drive for you as it formats (if it is a 2GB card tricked to reporting 16GB, it will trip up here). click next

12. click finish

13. in the bottom half of the screen you will not see your drive formatting, this might take a while, so leave it be and go have a cuppa or even better a beer

14. when its done test your drive as normal


let me know any error messages or if you get stuck on the above

[Edited on 19/9/12 by MikeFellows]

[Edited on 19/9/12 by MikeFellows]

Thanks for that Mike, I'll try that tonight
regards
Hugh