Over the past few years I have acquired a few dead flash drives, some I through out and other I keep. My question is, is there anything I can do to fix them. This is the general description of what happens. When I plug them into a computer they light up for a brief second and then nothing. I have at least two right now that do this and I may have more stored away somewhere and they all act in that same way. I have checked ans none of them have bad solders and so I have no clue what has happened to them. If any of you guys have any ideas on ways to fix them please let me know. I have plenty to mess around with to see if I can get them to work.

Edit: yes I have been searching google to see if anyone has the answer to my problems but they all are talking about it not working on one or a few computers where mine will not work with any. It is an issue with he usb drives not the computer itself.

Not really, unless you want to try and replace various components on it - in which case you better be really really good with a fine-tipped soldering iron...

A contact or two may have come loose connecting the board to the USB plug. I would see if any are loose and apply a little solder there. I had a drive do that to me, and I was able to make it workable again. If these drives are dead, you have nothing to loose really trying something out.

Yeah, I've had that problem before. However, I've also had drives where as Kllrnohj says, components physically fail, which is near-impossible to debug without the proper equipment, let alone repair.

Ok thanks I was just hoping to get them to work because it is getting harder to find 512MB or less drives to use with msd8x.

Normally I'd sympathize with wasting the space and using a larger drive, but memory is ridicuously cheap these days, so get yourself a $6 drive from some store and be happy.

well most stores near me don't have smaller than 1gb which doesn't work with msd8x but I'll find one.

Ebay? That would probably be your best bet, I assume you could find like 32MB or 64MB for <$3.

Try a cheap store like Rite Aid, Walgreens, or CVS. They often have little flash drives (256mb, 512mb). You may pay more than you'd like (around $15-20), but they'll do the trick.

Now, if you happen to have a Fry's Electronics store in your area, then you, my friend, are in luck...

What do you mean? I use a 1 GB flash drive with msd8x and it works fine.

Wow, welcome back Joostin and Fabi! I thought you could only use FAT16 drives with MSD8x...

No reason you can't format it as FAT16 and just piss away the extra space, though

It looks for the first FAT16 partition, so you could use a 500GB external hard drive, just create a small FAT16 partition at the beginning and do whatever you want with the rest.

Aha, fair point, that makes perfect sense.

OK I'll try that with a spare 1gb drive I have what do you guys suggest I use to partition it?

Windows Disk Manager itself can format a drive. If you are using Linux, there are a number of tools there to help also with that.

Windows will only do FAT32 and NTFS as far as I know, and even then you have to coax it into letting you format as FAT32...

Windows will do FAT16 for drives under 1-2 GB if my mind serves me right. I know if you are 512 or less, you will definitely be able to use FAT16.

Yeah I've been able to do fat16 for drives under 1gb in windows before but I've never tried to do it on a 1gb or larger drive I'll have to try it once I get access to a comp with admin privileges, aka tonight at my moms house.

Speaking of flash drives, the Wal-mart store in Kingston NY still sells 32mb ones, on the racks next to the checkouts, for 4$...And I had a 1gb flash drive that got statically shocked (I had foolishly left it on the table I was testing a home-build van-de-graff generator on), and it now shows up as a usb composite device...(And obviously is useless, since forcing it to use the standard usb mass storage driver doesn't work)