Flash sticks

[Mayayana]

This isn't specifically an XP question, but I'm hoping
that someone may know about it.

I have several USB flash sticks. Among them are
two 8 GB Sandisk Cruzers. One has a white thumb
slide. The other is newer, with a red thumb slide.
The newer one also came with pre-installed adware
that I removed.

All of the sticks have worked with all PCs I've used
them on, except that the red Cruzer is not seen on
a Windows 7 laptop. Win7 seems to think it needs a driver.
It doesn't show up in My Computer, nor in disk management.
And the stick doesn't light when it's inserted.

It always works in other PCs I've tried it in.
It never works in the laptop.
All other sticks I have work in the laptop.

I tried reformatting in a couple of ways with no luck.
Looking at the Sandisk site the only clue I found was
that low power (?) can cause problems. But that
doesn't explain why the 8 GB white Cruzer always works
fine.

 

[Tim Meddick]

Re-Formatting won't help, as if the file-system on the drive was the
problem, then it would still show-up as a new "Removable Drive" and assign
it a drive-letter as "New hardware"...

But the fact that you stated ; "Win7 seems to think it needs a driver"
means it never reached the point where it even tried to process what was
potentially on the drive (i.e.; the file system) and if the file system
*was* the problem, you should still be able to attempt formatting using the
same Win7 laptop.

It's a fair bet you have tried the drive in different USB slots on the
laptop? I think you must have done. So, I am tempted to think that the
drive is, at least in part, damaged, as nowadays, they don't make
flash-drives with any special driver requirements, and Win7 has all the
generic [default] drivers that WinXP has.

One last-ditch possibility, is the Win7 USB generic driver is corrupted,
and you might try replacing it with one from either a recent back-up, from
the Win7 installation disk or downloading a 3rd-party generic USB driver
from the internet.

(*NB) If other simple USB Flash "Pen" Drives work in the Win7 laptop - the
drivers are *not* going to be corrupted.

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London.

 

[Mayayana]

| It's a fair bet you have tried the drive in different USB slots on the
| laptop?

Thanks. Yes, I did try other slots.

| So, I am tempted to think that the
| drive is, at least in part, damaged,

I wondered if it were possible that there's been
a change whereby newer drives require more power
than a laptop can provide? Or maybe the pre-installed
adware corrupts the drive in some way that only Win7
is bothered by? But I'm grasping at straws. I simply
don't know anything, on a technical level, about how
flash drives work.

 

[aeroloose]

| It's a fair bet you have tried the drive in different
USB slots on the | laptop?

Thanks. Yes, I did try other slots.

| So, I am tempted to think that the | drive is, at
least in part, damaged,

I wondered if it were possible that there's been a change
whereby newer drives require more power than a laptop can
provide? Or maybe the pre-installed adware corrupts the
drive in some way that only Win7 is bothered by? But I'm
grasping at straws. I simply don't know anything, on a
technical level, about how flash drives work.

You didn't say if the other PCs you tried (desktop I assume)
were W7 or XP. If they were all XP, then W7 is still an
open suspect. If they are a mix, now you're back to the
singular laptop. Just for thoroughness' sake, have you
tried the stick in non-PC USB devices (e.g. TV, cable DVR,
etc.) to see if it's recognized?

OTOH, as you also suspect, a "voltage threshold" situation
may be cropping up. Sadly, I have no guidance to
trouble-shoot that one. Paul has been very helpful on
circuit-level USB power issues before; perhaps he can help.

 

[Paul]

| It's a fair bet you have tried the drive in different USB slots on the
| laptop?

Thanks. Yes, I did try other slots.

| So, I am tempted to think that the
| drive is, at least in part, damaged,

I wondered if it were possible that there's been
a change whereby newer drives require more power
than a laptop can provide? Or maybe the pre-installed
adware corrupts the drive in some way that only Win7
is bothered by? But I'm grasping at straws. I simply
don't know anything, on a technical level, about how
flash drives work.

No, it's not a power issue. The laptop or any computer,
should be able to provide at least 500mA to USB2 devices.
The current limiting device in the power path, gets upset
at a higher current flow level than that.

You'd do a few things.

1) Use UVCView to verify USB device config info. For example,
this would allow verifying the device is seen when plugged in.
Reading the configuration information, getting the class code
byte, is all part of setting up connections, and preparing for
actually reading higher level info from the device. If it can't
be seen in UVCView, it won't be showing up in Windows.

2) At the physical layer, you can use Device Manager, to observe
any new things successfully detected, in the USB section.

You can also look in setupapi.log, near the end of the file,
for entries caused by the plugging in of your USB stick.

3) The device could be composite. For example, a webcam has audio
and video, and may present two sub-devices. This shouldn't cause
any problems for the computer, as long as the config space info
(as seen in (1) above) is properly coded.

4) The device could present a USB storage device and a CDROM (readonly)
type of storage device. That is used on devices that wish to autorun
and install a driver. Perhaps a USB stick that supports encryption
would want such a scheme, to install the software that will ask
for a password.

5) The file system in the USB storage device section could be corrupted.
But you've verified the thing works on other computers, so that
isn't the problem.

So there are a few things you can check.

You can also boot a Linux LiveCD, on the computer that will not work
with the USB flash, and verify whether the Linux OS can see it or not.
A nice tool (available from Synaptic Package Manager, with all
repositories enabled) is "disktype", which can probe a partition
on a storage device and tell you what kind of file system is
present. If I couldn't get a partition to mount, I might try
that tool.

disktype /dev/sda1

and that would tell you whether there was NTFS or FAT32 or whatever on there.

On Linux, you can use "lsusb" to list detected USB devices.

Paul

 

[Mayayana]

Thanks to you both. I only have one Win7 PC,
which is the laptop. I can't remember for sure
whether the red cruzer was ever used on another
Win7 PC. Probably not. It's fairly new. (I don't
have anything else USB to test on. My multimedia
entertainment tastes are decidedly 20th century).

Device manager just show "cruzer" with ?, under
other devices.

The USBView/UVCView utility is interesting. Here's
a link for anyone interested. I wasted time digging
through the Win2003 DDK before finding this online:
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/services/technet/samples/ps/win98/reskit/DIAGNOSE/USBVIEW.EXE

The results I get are strange. On XP both the red and
white cruzer provide an identical readout. On Win7 the
white cruzer still shows the same, exact readout, but
the red cruzer readout changes at Open Pipes:
white: 2 red: 0
After that there are two Endpoint Descriptor sections
that are entirely missing for the red cruzer on Win7.
And the red cruzer shows as "Device Connected", but
is missing the descriptive string: USB Mass Storage
Device.

Very odd. I had actually tried re-installing the USB
drivers, but that had no effect. And of course they're
not malfunctioning except with this one stick.

What about some sort of DRM scheme protecting the
adware, that XP doesn't see? I guess that would have
to be done as some kind of low-level corruption for
it to survive a format.

 

[aeroloose]

Thanks to you both. I only have one Win7 PC,
which is the laptop. I can't remember for sure
whether the red cruzer was ever used on another
Win7 PC. Probably not. It's fairly new. (I don't
have anything else USB to test on. My multimedia
entertainment tastes are decidedly 20th century).

Device manager just show "cruzer" with ?, under
other devices.

<snip>

What about some sort of DRM scheme protecting the
adware, that XP doesn't see? I guess that would have
to be done as some kind of low-level corruption for
it to survive a format.

Now it gets interesting, since you mentioned in your
original post that you removed the adware. It "appears" a
DRM strategy failed to prevent that in an XP machine.
However, maybe the _adware's_ not actually all gone ... XP
just thinks it is. Far-fetched, perhaps, but we're in
uncharted waters . Could be the remnants are bollixing W7.

An off-the-wall thought; how about you (temporarily)
re-install the adware and retry it in the W7 machine? I
realize the original package is gone, but perhaps you could
find it on the Cruzer website, or get it from another Cruzer
stick.