Just as I was running out of options, I opened the autorun.inf file and found a very interesting entry: msi’s that shipped with the drive, but nothing wanted to run from the folder on my desktop. Now I just needed to figure out how to run the SanDisk installer to reformat the drive. One of the files was called SanDiskFormatExtension.dll, which sounded promising. Nothing happened, so I started looking more closely at the files. I plugged it in, copied the contents to my desktop and tried to run the U3 LaunchPad software. I had a clean drive that had escaped my earlier bungling. Maybe the full version could have done more, but I put that on the back burner.Ī number of people suggested attacking it with partitioning software, which I wasn’t looking forward to doing, but was willing to try.Īnother last resort was going to be using the Windows XP Recovery Console’s fixboot and fixmbr commands, which got me out of a pinch when I screwed up a partition. I tried the free trial of the utility from, but it reported the same information as Windows XP – that the device contained a disk with 0 bytes capacity. Someone else recommended FreeCommander, but that failed to open the drive, too. Someone suggested using this thing called “Apacer Repair v2.9.1.1” to reformat the drive, so I tried that, but the software only reported “USB Flash Disk not found!” when I ran it. There is no media in the specified device. I knew of one nifty program that had helped me out a few times before, so I tried running the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool v2.1.8, but attempting to format the drive with this utility returned the following error message: Software that didn’t helpįeel free to skip this part if you’re not interested in reading about the many dead-ends I explored. Well, I wasn’t going to publicize my mistake and return the drives, I was going to repair them. The most common solution offered was to return the drive to the manufacturer for replacement. Of the dozens of pages that I read, no one found a fix for the problem.

I Googled around and found that many, many people were running into this problem where the drive starts reporting 0 bytes capacity and can not be formatted. It shows up in the Device Manager as working correctly, without any warnings, for example. Opening the Disk Management component of the Computer Management console shows that the drive is connected, but there is no unallocated space to partition or format.

SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro USB Device Properties

Flash Usb Repair V2 9.1 1 Zip