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Acronis DriveCleanser Damage my USB flash drive

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I try to use Acronis DriveCleanser to wipe data on my 8GB USB flash drive. According to the progress bar, it will take more than 1 hour to complete the wipe operation. Since I do not have enough time to wait, I have to cancel the operation and want to do the wipe later.

However, after that, my USB flash drive cannot be accessed any more. When I plug in it, in Windows, I can see its drive H:, and when double-clicking H:, I can go into the drive, but there are no data.

1. When trying to format H: in Windows 7, there are no popup of the format dialog any more.

2. In Acronis DriveCleanser, I cannot see drive H: any more.

3. I try to use Acronis CloneDisk to clone the data from another 8GB USB flash drive to the damaged disk. However, in the destination disks, Acronis does not list the damaged disk any more.

How to solve this issue?

Thanks

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The USB drive needs to be reformatted and maybe repartitioned as well.

You can do this from either Windows Disk Management (right click My Computer, select Manage) or from an Admin command prompt using DiskPart. If you have a 3rd party disk partitioning tool such as Disk Director or Partition Magic you could use these as well.

Windows Disk Management does not work, it cannot recognize the disk at all. Neither does the diskpart command line tool.

Is this a new USB flash drive, or have you used it successfully for a while? I ask because there are tons of counterfeit flash drives, usually 8 GB or larger. They use poor-quality chips of low capacity that are reprogrammed to report a false high capacity, but they quickly fail.

If you go into diskpart and list the disks, you should see your drive. You might have to remove and reinsert the drive, but it should show up even if it does not have a partition allocated on it.

Go into "diskpart", and at the prompt enter "list disk". The drive should show up as one of them. If it is there, you can reinitialize it using a procedure similar to this:

select disk x <--- replace "x" with the disk number from the "list disk".
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
format fs=ntfs label="Your Label"
assign
exit

Another option would be to use the Acronis "add disk" option which is included in the installed version and the CD version of TrueImage--listed under tools.

This is an old USB drive. I have used it for several months without any problems. And before I using Acronis TrueImage, it works very well. I only need to clean all the data on it with TrueImage Cleaner. After that the break of the clean operation, it never works.

I have tried TrueImage's Add Disk already, it does not recognize it at all.