USB Flash Drive unrecognized but lives again

My mini USB flash keychain died today. It was a painful death as the device was no longer recognizable to my PC. I tried on another at the office and got the same scary error.

Over lunch, I mentioned to a friend (John) how sad I was to have my OCZ 2 GB Mini Kart die after just a few months, especially since I keep my personal wiki there with my notes.

In the afternoon, my friend sent a link with some software that he found in a web search. (It was very nice of him to think of my plight and look for some recovery software for me.) I had quit looking at software after a few minutes since the device was not recognized by the OS. Anyway, I decided to give the software a try, but I wasn't willing to try it out on my main PC. So I fired up an old PC to install the software. When I plugged the drive in... it worked!!! It gave me a message at the bottom of the screen that I was plugging in a usb 2.0 device and I would get better speed using a 2.0 port.

Looking back, I remember John mentioning to try a 1.1 port in his ideas over lunch too. I had forgotten about that very great suggestion, and was lucky to pick an older PC to try it on.

So now I have a flash drive that I'm guessing works only in usb 1.1 ports. I picked up a new SanDisk Micro 2 GB on the way home to replace the OCZ. Good Bye my tiny OCZ USB drive. It was fun.

Update: I get a few messages a month asking me what software I used to recover my drive.  While it is not clear from my entry, I never actually ran the recovery software.  The drive simply worked on an older USB port.  My drive was a USB 2.0 drive and the port was a 1.1 port.  The older port recognized the drive and I was able to get my data.