Lexar 16GB USB Drive not seen in Disk Utility

Haeo1397

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Dec 28, 2011
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Hi all,

I bought a Lexar 16GB usb flash drive (the back says: "LJDV10-16gb-000-111af 34014-16gbna 43138" I'm not sure which parts are the product code so thats all of it just in case)

Plugged it into my late 2012 13" Retina MBP running 10.9.2, and nothing. There is a red light on the USB which flashes red three times when plugged in then just glows in and out.

Doesn't show up in Disk Utility at all. So I googled around for a while and some people had the same problem however I couldn't find a definitive answer/solution anywhere.

Next I tried System Information, and got somewhere! This is the exact tree:

USB Hi-Speed Bus:

Host Controller Location: Built-in USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x1e2d
PCI Revision ID: 0x0004
PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086
Bus Number: 0x1a

Hub:

Product ID: 0x0024
Vendor ID: 0x8087 (Intel Corporation)
Version: 0.00
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Location ID: 0x1a100000 / 2
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 0

USB Flash Drive:

Product ID: 0xa81d
Vendor ID: 0x05dc (Lexar Media, Inc.)
Version: 11.00
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Lexar
Location ID: 0x1a120000 / 4
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 200


So it appears my mac sees something but won't display it?

I've tried DiskWarrior, but it couldn't find the drive.

I plugged the usb drive into a windows computer and the loading bar came up and said it was installing the device or something like that however when it was complete the drive didn't show up anywhere except Disk Manager. However in Disk Manager it shows there is something in D: but has 0bytes free and "no media". I assigned it a new letter but same result. I also couldn't format the drive, or anything like that. I played around with the driver settings, update, reinstall, etc, but no luck.

I reset my SMC and NVRAM and still nothing.

So this is where I'm at right now, I hope I've provided enough information.

Any ideas?
 
Solution
If you have access to a Windows computer you could try formatting the drive using the exFAT option as it will allow the drive to read from and written to on both a Mac and a PC. The other option is to format it using FAT32 but there is a 4GB file size limit with that option. It doesn't mean that you could only use 4GB of the flash drive but that files larger than 4GB would not be written to the drive. I apologize if I over-simplified the explanation as this may be something you already knew. Do not use NTFS if you plan to write to the flash drive using a Mac.
Hi,

Try using diskpart in an elevated Windows command prompt.


1) Open a command prompt (run as administrator).
2) Type in diskpart and press enter
3) type in list disk and press enter
4) type in select disk x (substitute x with the corresponding disk number of your flash drive in the list) and press enter
5) type in clean and press enter
6) type in create partition primary and press enter
7) type in active and press enter
8) type in format fs=ntfs label=LEXAR16GB quick and press enter
9) type in assign and press enter
10) type in exit and press enter

and you're all done.
 


Thank you for the advice! Unfortunately however I'm still stuck at square one.

Diskpart worked, shows my hard drive and the usb drive however the usb (disk1) has the status "no media" and a size of "0B"

I could select it however "clean" resulted in "Virtual Disk Service error: There is no media in the device" and "create partition primary" resulted in another error stating that there is not enough space to create a partition.

This is honestly the usb drive from hell, does this mean its toast? There isnt any data on it so data recovery is a non-issue I just could really use the drive right now.

Thank you!
 
If you have access to a Windows computer you could try formatting the drive using the exFAT option as it will allow the drive to read from and written to on both a Mac and a PC. The other option is to format it using FAT32 but there is a 4GB file size limit with that option. It doesn't mean that you could only use 4GB of the flash drive but that files larger than 4GB would not be written to the drive. I apologize if I over-simplified the explanation as this may be something you already knew. Do not use NTFS if you plan to write to the flash drive using a Mac.
 
Solution