How can I get an unreadable Flash Drive to work?

I got this pretty cool flash drive as a gift and I can't seem to use it. Every time I plug it in, a pop up comes up that says: The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

I opened up Disk Utility and tried to erase it, in the hope of making it readable. It shows the loading bar and after a couple minutes, a pop-up appears and says: Disk Erase failed with the error: Unable to write to the last block of the device. So I remove it, and try again with no avail. I even tried using terminal and the diskutil eraseVolume command and I get:

newfs_hfs: write (sector 0): Invalid argument

Mounting disk

Could not mount disk2 with name (null) after erase

Error: -69832: File system formatter failed

So I tookit out, and tried again with diskutil randomDisk just to see if I couldeven write on it. and then I got this:

Started erase on disk2
Error: -69879: Couldn't open disk
Underlying error: 2: POSIX reports: No such file or directory

Does anyone have any idea how I can make this drive readable?

Solution 1:

You've said in your question that you've been trying to erase the flash drive; not format it. Try formatting instead by doing the following:

• Open Disk Utility
• Select your flash drive
• Select the Partition tab
• Select Partition 1 under Partition Layout
• Name the drive what you want under Partition Information
• Make sure Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is selected under Format
• Select Apply
• Now sit back and watch your Mac do the rest
• Rejoice!

Let me know if this works, or if you have any other questions. Good luck!

Solution 2:

Can you get the disk identifier? In Disk Utility, select the drive and choose "Info" – it should read something like disk1 or disk2 or so. (But NOT disk0; that's your internal HD!)

Then open a terminal, and type in

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX

(where diskX is of course the disk identifier you got earlier.)

Type in your admin password, and it should overwrite every block of the disk with 0x00 (i.e. erase it).

Then, you can format your drive.

[Please be cautious when doing this; I'm not responsible for anything if anything goes wrong ;-)]

Solution 3:

I had this problem with an USB stick in our Xbox 360. It would gave errors and could not be formatted on my iMac. I configured the stick first in the Xbox and after that there was no problem in partitioning it on the Mac.

It appears that the USB device was still in some kind of "busy-mode".