Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

[craigwatanabe]

Weird problem popped up this past weekend with my 256mb SanDisk Microcruzer USB thumbdrive. When I put it in any computer's USB port it tells the computer that it's a cd-rom drive.

Because it thinks it's something it isn't, Windows XP cannot reformat it. Anyone ever had this problem with a thumbdrive, especially a SanDisk?

Oh the temptation to buy a 2gb thumbdrive!!!

On the flip side, (Legal Racial disclaimer: Sorry not meant to be racist to Filipinos), I just received my 2.5" external hard drive enclosure I bought from geeks.com for $7.95. This thing rocks as I can now put in this Toshiba 6Gb laptop hard drive in it and use it as a portable storage device (doesn't need a power cable...runs off the USB power).

So now I have two 80Gb, one 40Gb, and one 6Gb external hard drives and one internal hard drive removable tray to mount another 40Gb hard drive in for a total of five external hard drives.

AND ONE DEFUNCT THUMBDRIVE!!!

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

Craig, is this one of those new U3 flash drives? Scrivener was complaining about those things a while ago. Maybe that's what you're seeing too.

If the flash drive has a logo like this:



then it's a U3 drive.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

Nope this was one of those 256Mb thumbdrives that I picked up for a fantastic deal of $29 at CompUSA about a year ago. I'm wondering if the contacts are just dirty so it can't communicate with the USB ports.

One thing I love about these little darlings is that I can load up Ad-Aware SE and AVG 7.X on it along with SpyBot S&D. When I go to people's homes to clean their computer I download these files and update their antivirus and anti-spyware capability without having to go to the internet. All this from my keyring.

[adrian]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

(Legal Racial disclaimer: Sorry not meant to be racist to Filipinos)

You know what, I only know one filipino who gets irritated by people who say "flip", and that's my police officer friend. Sometimes we joke around by saying that word a lot, but I don't see why we should be bothered by that.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

When Diner's was located at the now Ala Moana WalMart location, they had the 7-Up/Fruit Punch mix we politically correctly now call "Frup" but at Diner's it was menu'd as "Flip". I just couldn't look the Filipino Counter gal in the face and order a Flip...I ended up describing the mix to her where as she responded, "Oh sir you want a Flip?" As a young man in my 20's and seeing this equally young and attractive woman asking me that question, I had to stop and ponder, then laugh at her suggestion...for at that moment I had visions of being in one of Keeaumoku's (more affectionately known as: Koreamoku) many Korean bars.

[scrivener]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

Craig, have you tried running the MacOS disk utility? I'd be interested in what it did or didn't do.

[pzarquon]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

Craig, have you tried running the MacOS disk utility? I'd be interested in what it did or didn't do.

Craig mentioned this was on a Windows XP system.

I have no idea what it might be, either. A messed up BIOS setting? (Do you get the same result in all USB ports on the computer? On another computer?) A corrupted device type ID on the thumb drive itself? Frankly, I'd go with the instinct to use this as an excuse to get a new, bigger one.

[scrivener]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

Craig mentioned this was on a Windows XP system.

Yes, but he said when he "put it in any computer's USB," so I thought that meant when he tried ANY computer . A frequent try in my problem-solving repertoire is to try stuff on a Mac first and then on a PC -- getting different results often gives you a clue about what might be going on.

[scrivener]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

Nope this was one of those 256Mb thumbdrives that I picked up for a fantastic deal of $29 at CompUSA about a year ago.

Is there a CompUSA in Hilo now?

Craig, maybe the drive doesn't think it's a CD-ROM; maybe the computer thinks the drive is a CD-ROM because of the drive's permissions. I don't know how permissions work on XP, but there must be a way to see if some freak occurrence has switched it to read-only, and there must be some way to switch it back. This is what was happening with my student's drive -- MacOS thought it was a CD drive because (I believe) its parent partition was set to read-only.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

I've tried it on several computers, none of which are MacOS. I think something's up with the drive itself but I'd hate to have to toss this out if there's some utility out there that can identify this problem.

And no there isn't a CompUSA here in Hilo. I bought this when I was back in Honolulu.

As for read only...that's an interesting thought as I would believe a read only thumb drive could possible be seen as an optical drive. I'm believing there's a dirty contact on this drive...maybe the contact to send data back to the computer.

Anyway tomorrow I'll go clean the contacts and try again. Thanks for all the possibilities.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Sandisk microcruzer thinks its a CDROM drive

I finally got my 256Mb SanDisk thumbdrive to work again!!!! The fix was just wayyy too easy and I stumbled onto it while reformatting another hard drive.

I simply plugged in the MicroCruzer into a USB slot, went to Disk Management and simply reformatted the drive in FAT32. When I did a "Properties" inquiry on that thumbdrive, I noticed it said "RAW" meaning it was totally unformatted, that's why it showed up as a CD-ROM drive. By formatting it in FAT32, Windows was able to recognize it again as a "disk drive".

Now I have two 256mb thumbdrives from SanDisk as I went out and bought another one.