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Low-Level Format For a USB Flash Drive?
Luyseyal writes "I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively. I have a USB flash card reader that will read/write the current one at USB 1.0 speed, but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting." Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?
The typical ask Slashdot articles of late:
Dear Slashdot,
Something brown just fell out of my butt and it smells really bad. What should I do?
http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter_3/
Hmm.
It's probably because the flash chips sit behind any number of proprietary controller chips. Who knows how they abstract the high end (filesystem access) from the low end (writing actual sectors).
Give DBAN a try. This tool never fails me for any kind of disk I throw at it.
http://www.dban.org/download
Not sure when it locks up the system.
Try
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-order,4/description.html
"... but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting."
I wonder if GNU Shred would be something to try, at the device level? Let's say your flash drive shows up as /dev/sdc, then you'd do this:
shred -v -n 1 /dev/sdc
(You might even try -n 3.) I think this would work, but I don't know what wear leveling would do when shredding a USB flash drive.
Once you run shred, you'll have wiped the entire flash drive. That means you'll need to repartition the device and lay down a new filesystem.
Might work.
Ahm.. has the meaning of this term changed? Last time I heard the term it referred to syncing a drive and it's controller, and thus fell out of usage with the rise of IDE disks.
Internet trolls rarely believe their own material. They're like evil comedians. Don't get worked up about it. :)
That's ridiculous. A-DATA sells crap. Reformatting will not change that.
The controller is probably fried, maybe a voltage spike or static electricity occurred. Or it's just cheap Chinese crap. So it can't talk to the USB host controller properly.
The actual NAND memory is probably fine but unless you want to resolder a controller chip just toss the drive.
I've used the industrial paper shredder at work to destroy flash drives when they were no longer recognizible by the host yet they still had potentially sensitive personal or corporate data on them.
Take the PCB out of the housing, snap off the USB connector and feed the board into it, the flash chip gets ground to bits so no adversaries can recover your data. :D
Fat 16 or Fat 32, unless you use with Vista. If you use with Vista or 7, install with ext3 and install Vista or 7 with ext3 drivers
Encrypt your data to avoid such hassles in the future. Encryption makes theft or loss of your medium a non-problem, besides the lost material value.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdiskxxx bs=1024000
or whatever variation you need for your distro. The above is for mac os x. yes, rdisk is a character device I know I know, but for some reason os x io's a LOT faster o that than the block device. (double or better) No idea why. Block works too tho, whatever works for you. Just plug in the correct disk number for the xxx. Careful which device you're nuking, dd is both swift and unforgiving.
I'd also like to get slightly pedantic and point out that this is NOT a low level format. Low level format refers to laying down the address blocks, and also the data headers and trailers. All dd does is write zeros to the meat of the data block, and update its checksum. There's no such thing as a low level format for non magnetic media because flash drive blocks are electrically addressed, not physically.
FWIW, you can probably tack on "count=20" to make things go much faster. I assume all you need is the partition table completely zapped, and the first 20mb should do it fine. Without this it will wipe the entire device, which for a flash drive may take a little bit. But then again your distro or whatnot may try to find a backup copy of the boot block and partition table etc at the end of the device in which case just wipe the whole thing to avoid it "fixing it" for you.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You ought to know.
Likewise, I'll have to ask you if troll-feeding idiots use flash drives.
If you are too fucking uptight to handle nigger jokes on /., why are you browsing at -1?
How does an AC browse at -1? We only have access to "more" and "full|abbreviated|hidden" bars.
Drag the bar so all the comments are full, that's basically -1 mode.
Somewhat offtopic, but related. I have a similar question but with respect to a USB stick. It seems that over time and with repeated use, my USB stick has gotten slower and slower. There was an article here a while ago about such a slowdown with SSDs.
So is there a utility/tool (for windows) that can test/restore USB memory stick performance?
First find out the device of the flash disk.
The following fixed a USB disk which was hosed:
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
or
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
It's not a format, but fixes corrupt files, which can cause the disk to be unuseable.
How does an AC browse at -1?
He logs in and checks the "Post Anonymously" box.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?
Spell: Resurrection
Level: 7
Range: Touch
Duration: Instantaneous
Any brand has the occasional lemon but overall WD is decent. People expect unrealistic things from hard drives too. You're talking about a device extremely sensitive to heat, moisture, vibration, and magnetism at the least and people want to cram 2TB of priceless family photos and their thesis paper into a $50 device without making backups. Yeah that's a recipe for disaster. I know - I've made the same mistake and paid for it. Lately I've been using WD Caviar Black 1TB w/ 64MB cache drives in a Drobo Elite and they've been doing pretty well but I expect to lose a couple of them per year under the stress of being in a server. Certain files I keep in RAID5 on Corsair Nova SSD drives and I use the same drives in my laptops and they've done pretty well. And of course everything is backed up to a NAS drive of which I use both WD My Book World Edition II - 2 TB (2 x 1 TB in RAID1) and Drobo FS. Previously I had used a couple cheaper NAS and Firewire/USB/eSATA drives for backup but all of them died. One happened to die at the same time the main drive died which was unpleasant - both were about six months old. I think hard drive manufacturers should have to include free data restoration for the life of the warranty. The main expense of data restoration is getting exact matching parts for your drive so the manufacturer could do it MUCH cheaper and easier than anyone else. Wouldn't hurt to have a drive stop working completely, unless a jumper is switched, when it senses itself dying so it won't self destruct further. Of course if I got to pick I'd like to see standard sized PC and laptop drives come w/ two physically separate drives and RAID 1 so the drive could sense death and go into a read-only recovery mode. Data is way more valuable than hardware so every possible effort should be made to make data possible to recover. 1TB for $150 is fine with me - instead of offering me 2TB for the same price give me the built-in RAID1.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Best format tool for these AData cards is http://www.canadiantire.ca/AST/browse/6/Tools/HandTools/Hammers/PRD~0574014P/Stanley%252BFatMax%252BBrick%252BHammer.jsp?locale=en
please!
-
If speed is a factor, then none of the answers I read above apply to your issue.
Your el cheapo flash card has a temperature-sensitive hardware defect which probably turned into an inability to read at hi-speed when the unit heated up to a certain temp and caused some poorly-made part of the chips to act flakey or broken. At USB 1.x speeds, the flash unit remains cool so access to it remains OK. Consider returning that flash card.
Of course, there is another possible explanation: Your particular flash reader device has an incompatibility with your flash cards (possible but not likely). You could try different readers if you haven't already.
I'm seeing a lot of geniuses telling each other what won't work. Can someone post or validate the solution instead of jumping on the folks that are trying to help?
I have tried adata. Slow and prone to failures. THey are pure pieces of junk. Return it if you can, and if not, then you just got an education.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The OP was grasping at straws.
There is no "low level format" for USB drives. A low level format is used on floppies, and ancient hard drives to write address information to the sectors on the media, so after you seek to a track, you can tell which sector is about to spin past. There is no equivalent for solid state memory - addressing is an intrinsic property of the device.
What does apply to solid state media, is creating file system structures, sometimes called "high level formatting." "format c:" in WinDOS, "mkfs" in *nix.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"low level format" is a term relevant to old magnetic disk drives, you can't do that to a solid state logical device like flash.
you probably can't fix it at all, if it sort of works at low speed and fails athigh speed there is probably a hardware fault not a formatting issue, a formatting issue would present seemingly at random or when writing a certain amount of data, being affected by speed strongly indicates a hardware defect or failure.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
There's no such thing as a "low level format" on a flash drive. The term refers to specifying where the tracks are at on a magnetic disk. It was possible, although incredibly stupid, back in the day to perform a low level format on a hard drive and tell it to move the tracks closer together. As a result, you could bump your 10MB disk to 12MB.
This works only because the physical magnetic disk doesn't "know" anything about tracks and sectors. It always drives me crazy when someone who wants to wipe a drive clean, asks me about a "low level format", when what they want to do is zero out the drive (ie dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda).
For a flash drive, each memory cell physically has a 1-to-1 correspondence to a bit (or several bits) of information, so there's no low level format.
Flash is cell-based. There is no way to low-level format a Flash chip without advanced chip-making equipment. In addition, nobody wants to do it, because it cannot help any problems.
So your Google Fu is exactly right, no reader can do it.
However what you can try is throwing it away and getting some quality storage instead. That is about the only thing that will help.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Like any good developer I'm ignoring what the customer asked for and trying to figure out what they need. ;)
You want to be able to write to the card at more than 1.0 speed. Here's some random thoughts:
1. Have you tried a different reader? Fry's sells them for as little as $7.99 (Sorry, couldn't resist that one.)
2. Have you tried a different class of device? How about formatting in a camera or PDA and see if that allows you to then read/write at the faster speed on a PC.
3. Can you return or exchange it as defective? If it isn't transferring at the advertised rate then that assumption can be made. See if they can get to full speed at Fry's.
4. You didn't mention what versions of Ubuntu you tried, but is it current? How about Windows 7 or a live CD of another distro? (see #1)
Of all the ba-jillion cards out there the fact that you've had problems with two of them with the symptoms you describe makes me think the problem might be on your end. Just a guess. Either way, good luck.
And I do mean one time, but three years later I'm still using the thumb drive. The following assumes a Linux environment. First, pull off any data you can (and want to), then unmount it and type:
/dev/sdg, not /dev/sdg1. This guarantees that all the Flash blocks on the chip are reset. The patterns 0xAA, 0x55, 0xFF, and 0x00 are written, then checked; "shred" does no checking, and doesn't report errors. The "-s" is to show continuous progress.
#badblocks -w -s device-path
Use the entire device, e.g.
If you get any errors (and you probably will, if the device is as weak as you say), simply re-run the "badblocks" command, and note if the error count goes down. The one time I did this, I got a few errors (less than 10) the first time, but zero the second time. Whatever badblocks caused on the low level of the device, it was just what the doctor ordered. I hope it can help you, too.
Here's what I used to use for a low-level format:
A>debug
g=c800:5
If you've got a fairly speedy machine, set the interleave to 1:1. Don't forget to input the list of bad blocks so the drive won't try to store data in them. There's some more info in this KB article
HTH, HAND
You need to learn you lesson for patronizing vendors of cheap garbage technology.
Why did you not pay a little more for your flash drives and get something more reliable? If you want to go to the trouble of resurrecting your half-dead flash drives you can spend the $10-20 on a new one from a major brand name.
The problems you describe sound like shitty controller circuitry, that's either failing, poorly designed or quite likely both.
The lower level operations of flash are abstracted away behind the controller, with the exception of some drives theres you can't do much about it.
USB Flash drives and cards can be brought back to as-new performance by performing a write-erase pass over the entire drive. This was used to revive degraded used SSDs that would drop in performance, the TRIM feature now takes care of this on the fly. About all you can do for thumb drives and cards is to perform a single erase pass. If that doesn't work you're SOL.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
add &threshold=-1 to any thread in url bar
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/flashdrive
I'm really not sure why this is a question.
If your computer really locks up both in Windows and in Ubuntu, this is a hardware fault. Chuck the drive. But perhaps it's better not to limit yourself to the drive, since if I'm not mistaken your USB controller should be tolerant of most device faults not involving current spikes and suchlike. If it isn't, you may have discovered a security hole, although of course there's always the adage that physical access (including the ability to plug in USB-memory) throws all security out of the window.
Which is why I'm kind of sad that USB-memory has become the primary r/w data interchange medium. It used to be the case that data carriers had a separate interface from peripherals (like a diskette slot, or a cd-tray, or a tape streamer) and you could safely insert any unknown data carrier in your machine. (Executing the contents is a different matter of course.) Now, even if it looks like a USB flash drive, you can't ever really be sure what it is. It may emulate a keyboard and enter a command in the console. Or it could pretend to be a mouse. It may present itself as a read-only cd-rom (which is still autorun-enabled on Windows XP by default). Or it may contain an internal battery and discharge itself on your USB controller. Sadly, I only made the last one up.
A-Data is unambiguously crap. Buy a new card.
If you use linux you can just do:
#cat /dev/zero > /dev/sdX
Until it gets a ENOSPC (no space left on device) from the system.
I always do this when in such situation and it
always works like a charm.
And next time don't spend $40 on a crappy flash drive.
Goddammit!! I wish I could mod that up five times. That's funny as hell... Thanks, man!
If you want to use it, go buy a reliable piece of hardware.
If you want to wipe it for disposal, just hit it with a hammer.
Some things are not worth your time. Even if your time has no value.
I am responding to your post on the chance that you are seeing a photo import bug because you use gthumb.
The 16GB flash card you link to in your Ask Slashdot question looks like the 8GB flash card I use in my digital camera.
If you are doing digital photography and using Ubuntu or a Linux, take note that the photo import utility in gthumb is broken in Ubuntu 9.10. The gthumb version is 2.10.11 and the specific thing broken is photo import of jpeg images. Photo import fails if there are .avi movie files on the flash card.
I have had a series of flash card aggravations and here is my version of the preceding AskSlashdot comments:
1. Digital cameras format flash memory cards with minor variations or they store image data with minor variations. I work around potential glitches by keeping the card in the camera and connecting the camera to the Ubuntu computer.
2. Use gthumb (note bug above) or the graphical file tool Nautilus. The top level menu item "Places" in Ubuntu starts Nautilus. Copy the files from the camera to the computer.
3. Speaking about USB flash memory, I feel they have devolved into a Windows quality file transfer device = WQFTD That means, they work using the supplied file system. The success of the same devices using Ext2 and Ext3 file systems is problematic.
4. Measuring the read and write reliability of these WQFTDs at the bit level is a difficult problem. As I mention in my journal, I have a big name DVD drive that is a WQFTD. I know it fails when reading huge 8 bit data files. But, building a tool to prove when and where it fails is beyond my available time as an evening hacker.
5. So one answer is "simplify and work around your WQFTD" without challenging it's limits.
In short: you're screwed. Unless you've got important data on them (ie not recoverable from a different source), throw them out and pick up some more (preferably a different model, at least until this one improves.)
What you've got on your hands there is defective flash (likely). There is no 'recovering' it as a storage medium. In essence, you paid for a 16GB, $40 floppy drive. Next time, unless you've got an overt need for 16GB all on one card, get several smaller ones. Sure, you're "throwing away" your cards; maybe you should've RMA'd them sooner as defective.
I'm somewhat surprised that the A-DATA memory is bad, on account of them not being known for crap quality. On the other hand, most vendors seem to pick and choose flash memory chips by price: there really is no consistency from even one card to the next within the same lots, it seems.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
yes, rdisk is a character device I know I know, but for some reason os x io's a LOT faster o that than the block device. (double or better) No idea why.
In "traditional" UNIXes (Mac OS/X is little more than a pretty front-end on top of traditional died-in-the-wool BSD4.4 Unix, regardless of what Steve Jobs tells you), every block device has always a character device counterpart, and the character part is always much faster for block-sized/aligned I/O; the idea is that the block device will handle whatever size/alignment you throw at it, while the character device will insist on block-sized-and-aligned I/O or return an error (the "bs=1024000" you specified to dd does just that). The difference in speed comes (theoretically) from the fact that the block device must "cook" its I/O to satisfy align/size requirements (*perhaps* -- I've checked the sources, but it's been a long time -- reading the data first from the disk, then "merging" your output and only then writing it back), while the character device doesn't.
Contrarywise, Linux does not have 2 devices for each disk:you get /dev/sdX (or /dev/hdX if you have a PATA drive and your kernel isn't using LIBATA), and it works on both "modes" (very fast when you are doing block-sized/aligned I/O, and not so fast otherwise).
Just $0.02 from someone who has started fussing with UNIX back on the early 1980's on a PDP-11/70 running Bell Labs Unix v7 (you can't be much more traditional than that... :-))
Best Regards,
Durval Menezes.
I have never met a computer that didn't like me.
From watching SuperFlyFlippingA's videos on YouTube, I would probably say you can't do any low level format unless you have a custom USB mass storage driver. The reason is due to the USB drivers being generic in nature and the only way you can send it the complete ATA command set (i.e.: secure erase) is to attach your device directly to the motherboard's ATA/SATA interface (maybe through some bridge?). MHDD won't help even if it knows how since the generic driver blocks the command(s).
...and everyone talking about "low level formatting" memory chips needs to have their geek card revoked.
http://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks Most modern hard drives don't need low level formatting anymore as they will rewrite the block headers when they write the block (the gap between the header and the data was a waste of space) Flash drives have always erased and written all the data in the 'superblocks'. But flash drives have a very simple filesystem on them to do the wear levelling the best way to reset this is to use the drive's "Secure erase" function. If you can't get at this feature or the drive is crap and doesn't have the feature you can usually coax it into making everything linear by writing to every block in the drive in order. You'll probably have to do it at least twice for the drive to get the idea. My favourite tool for doing this is the ext2 badblocks command, for hard disks I let it run the 4 pass default (AA 55 FF 00) which in addition to rewriting every block reads them back too and so gives the SMART controller a chance to everything in order. I tend to do the same for flash drives, but worry a little about it making too many writes.
should not make any difference to the life of the drive - should still be good for around 5 years unless it has any unexpected problems. Colon Nutra Cleanse
While we're talking of flash cards/memory sticks I have found that if you try and put a file larger than 4Gb on a USB Memory stick it becomes unreadable. I realize that they use a FAT file system but no operating system (Linux in this case) should allow that to happen. It's easily done accidentally. The device is not even visible in /dev. I've lost several USB sticks that way and wonder if anyone has a solution to recover them.
marking bad sectors is part of high level (file system) formatting. There was no standardized way to mark bad sectors at the media/device level (addresses were physical, e.g. h/t/s, not logical), keeping track of bad blocks was all done at the file system level.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I have two flash cards by them. (both have been returned and replaced, so actually four)
All had trouble retaining their data from several >different host devices, one even killed my laptop IDE controller.
(with a ide-flash converter, yes that was a "hack", but still shouldn't have fried the controller)
I did low-level formats using ide-flash converter, did not change a thing.
In the end I tried everything, even opening en checking pcd and solder joints, apparently the chips just suck.
So just, seriously avoid Adata memory.
Sorry
My solution to low level formatting can be found here. Works well on both hard drives with Platters and the Solis State variety.
http://www.harborfreight.com/6-ton-a-frame-bench-shop-press-1666.html
Oh and its fun.
In my experience crap is crap even if it didn't start out that way. When it starts to fail trash it save the headaches. You can spend a lot of time trying to resurrect a drive. Unless it is simple data corruption don't wast the time and effort it will only fail at the most inopportune time costing you precious data and the time to recreate if that is even possible. Flash drives are cheap I have gone through a lot. as soon they start to develop problems I trash them immediately. Flaky drives have cost me much and I always keep them backed up.
You stole the second one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't know about the formatting, but I've had problems with flash readers "hanging" Windows that were fixed by using a better USB cable. The cheap cables that come with USB flash readers usually aren't up to the job of handling USB 2.0 speeds.
that's the difference between a black guy and a nigger. The nigger doesn't ask if he can bone a girl and doesn't care how fat or ugly she is.
2. Use gthumb (note bug above) or the graphical file tool Nautilus. The top level menu item "Places" in Ubuntu starts Nautilus. Copy the files from the camera to the computer.
Rather than gthumb or Nautilus, I use the command-line tool rsync, as follows: rsync -avc (source) (destination), with the source being the flash memory card. When the copy is complete I remove the card, re-insert it, and run the command again. The "c" in "-avc" means to checksum the corresponding files, and copy them again if the checksums don't match. When this triggers a re-copying of a file I know that the card is failing, and discard it.
I bought a bunch of cheap cards when I first got my camera. After some bad experiences with losing pictures I now test each card that I buy, filling it with data and using the above technique to verify that I can get the same data from it twice running. If I can't, the card is discarded. If I ever buy cards locally, I will return bad ones for replacement instead of discarding them.
Repair work is _not_ "Click Here" or otherwise for n00bs.
If the USB isn't being read right, first check the hardware -- look at the output of `dmesg` under Ubuntu or other Linux. At the bottom there should be recent USB event entries.
Presuming the USB interface isn't fried (no entries), then check the master boot record (MBR) with `fdisk /dev/wherever`. All the USB keys I have seen emulate hard-disks and have the MBR. Quite possibly it has gotten messed up by a MS-Windows virus, improper disconnect or other. Without a correct MBR or superfloppy sig, no OS can interpret the data on the disk.
You can certainly reformat the filesystem once the MBR is fixed, but avoid totally replacing the MBR or otherwise repartitioning unless you know all about flash erase blocksizes and alignment. Ty T'so has a nice discussion for SSD here.
How does an AC browse at -1?
He logs in and checks the "Post Anonymously" box.
should be rated: (Score:-5 InCiteful)..
There.. fixed that ;)
I've used Canon point & shoot cameras for many years, and pictures could easily be transfered by connecting the camera directly to a computer with a USB cable. No need to pull the SD card. The computer that I have dedicated for photography runs Win 2k and it works fine with USB 2.0.
Then I bought a Canon A1100 IS. This camera works with XP but not Win 2k. To be fair, Canon specifies XP.
But I still can't figure out what changed, and its not comforting that USB 2.0 on one device is not compatible with USB 2.0 on others. Canon is not alone.
Does anyone know what gives?
They have bad joints, use an air reflow or a reflow oven and you'll probably be rather happy with the card.
You can also probably flex the board in the right way to get contact and get your data off as well, but you're going to want to reflow it to get any sort of long term use.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If you're feeling particularly ambitious you could make a little wiring harness to a microcontroller capable of being a NAND controller, a PIC/AVR could do it, not efficiently but cheaply. Then just go through all of the NAND blocks and erase the data and spare areas. The important bit is erasing the spares, that will cause the mapping algorithms to start over again and re-learn the bad sectors, and hopefully do a better job the next time around.
You could mark them as bad yourself, but then you'd have to learn how the USB drives firmware decides to tag bad sectors. There are a few different algorithms used and a variety of ways to encode the error correcting codes. Different controllers attached to the NAND prefer different schemes because it is often hardware accelerated.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Here is the back story: It was the camera that killed it. (Not blaming the wife because the camera should be smart enough to not turn the power off to the flash card before it has finished its write cycle...)
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3K won't even read the thing anymore. It just says it is a bad card. Doesn't even offer to format it. However, since it will read/write at USB 1.0 speeds, I'm wondering if a software fix will work.
-l
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Might not be the card. I got one of my cards apparently go bad and couldn't be read by Windows and my cameras. Under Gnome it did not function properly, and couldn't be reformatted under Gnome or Windows. I found on Google that the Linux drivers for SD were flaky. Reformatting it using the shell under Linux (and not Gnome) fixed it. The card has been OK since.
To format as FAT under the Linux shell:
umount /dev/sdf1 (or whatever device it is) /dev/sdf1
mkdosfs -F 16
Then remount the card (or remove/reinsert it).
An alternative that I didn't try is
mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcda
... and on most hard disks as well.
Or did the meaning of low level formatting change the last ten years, and I missed it?
A low level format writes on a completely empty disk markers for sector begin and sector end. Thats it, there is no file system or nothing else on it. After that you do a high level format which instals empty directories, inodes or what ever your file system is based on.
As a flash drives consists only out of "random access memory" and not out of "empty nothingness on a magnetic plate" there are obviously no low level formats necessary or even possible.
I simply don't get what the guy posting this question wants to accomplish by "formatting" a SSD ... except as installing a new empty filesystem on it (which is not a low level formatting).
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
the reader could well be the problem. the card are probably ok
There is no such thing as a low-level format, for flashdrives.
It might not help this particular poster out, and it's a windoze program, but in case anyone is interested, I've been recommending Check Flash by Misha Cherkes to individuals and businesses for some time now, and hear nothing but positive comments back.
http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/chkflsh_en
The above: a boring waste of data.
This, too.
Return it. Fry's is a rental store, and whenever I buy junk that just doesn't work, I return it and get a refund. They do sell crap that doesn't work as advertised.
No, I will not work for your startup
From the OP we can determine (1) that the card you are having problems with is an SDHC, and (2) that you are a cheapskate. Based on this, I am wondering if your USB to SD interface properly supports HC cards...?
they used aes and it still didnt stand up to a month or so on a distributed computing platform. ok, your stuff might not be worth brute forcing, but still. in 10years things might have changed. and data can be easily stored and might even remain sensitive or valuable for that long.