USB wizardry

[MisterDood]

So I have an old 2 gig mp3 player, and after getting a better one, I now use this one as a jump drive. It has a lid that slides off with a USB under it, pretty much making it a flash drive that plays music. A little information about it can be found by searching the phrase "Coby MP300 2GB MP3 Player" on Google. I can't post links yet since I haven't made 15 posts, so sorry about that.

Anyways, I've recently formatted the device, and since then, it's had a horrible write protection glitch where I can't save anything to it, or delete anything from it. It used to only do this on windows, but now it happens on Ubuntu as well. I've tried looking up ways to fix it, and haven't found anything other than it more than likely being corrupt.



Now for the actual question. Can I take this corrupt flash drive like device, and somehow convert it into a properly functioning jump drive with buttons? The drive isn't empty, but I don't need any of the contents, so is there a way that I can install new firmware on it? (that is, if flash drives even have firmware).

I don't know anything about how flash drives work, so any help would be amazing and greatly thanked.

[MikeTbob]

My thinking on this is that USB flash drives are so cheap....they are disposable and easily replaced.
I think the best you could hope for is to find bad sectors on the drive and partition around those bad sectors if possible but eventually the drive will fail completely. You could try formatting it again and see what happens from there.

[MisterDood]

I'm still Ubuntu-illiterate, and I don't know how to format drives on it. I tried it on Windows though, and it said that I couldn't because it write protected. Does this mean it's completely gone bad?

[MikeTbob]

I don't know if that is correct or not. I'd still try formatting it again. If you have a network connection in Ubuntu you can install gparted and use that to partition and format the drive.

sudo apt-get install gparted

[MisterDood]

Magically, it works like a charm. Thank you. I don't think it'll last long though, so I'll be sure to invest in another jump drive. Thank you. Also, there's something else that I've been pondering under the topic of USB drives.

I've heard that you can do something to your jump drive to make it extra RAM, and I'm pretty sure that if I did that, It wouldn't work as a flash drive anymore. Anyway, I'd like to know how/if it can be done.

And thanks again.

[MikeTbob]

I'm not sure what you are referring to except maybe creating a swap file on it.
Linux.com :: Increase your available swap space with a swap file
Unless you have a need for more memory I think it's a waste of time.

[MisterDood]

Probably something to that effect. I'll look into it.

Also, my flash drive stopped working again, and it's doing the same thing it's doing on Windows. It's saying that I can't format it because it's write protected.
I'm guessing it's just corrupt. Do you have any other ideas?

[MikeTbob]

My guess is that part of the drive is owned by the software that came installed onto the drive when you bought it. Unless the drive has some sort of switch on it to prevent accidental overwrites.

[MisterDood]

Probably your first thought. I'll just play with it and see what I can do. Thanks for all of the help. I'll probably be back here sometime in the next few days with questions about Apache. I have a book, but I don't know how much that's going to help.

Anyway, thanks again for the help.