Having problems with a USB flash drive

[Hareth]

I have a "Adata" 1GB flash drive .. that i bought a year ago ... that worked fine till a couple of days ago ... now i`m having serious and annoying ishuess with it ...

When ever i plug it into the PC .. it automatically detects it as normal ... but when i try to access it it says .. that the drive is un accessable and needs formating, when i "right-click" and check its properties in MyComp ... it says that the drive has 0 bytes space on it .. and 0 bytes used *o_O*. Ok .. since the data on the drive wasn't that important to me .. but the drive itself i went ahead and format the drive, now it shows me the correct values when i check its properties ... and i can use it normally to store data on it .. but if i unplug it .. and plug it again .. the drives goes to the "Drive unaccesable .. needs format" etc etc.

A friend of mine who has a tad more knowledge in the matter than myself said that the drive's boot sector is damaged and that i should seek out some kind of software to repair this. Since then i tried a gazzilion types of programs & software .. but i still didn't managed to fix it. I`m thinking my problem is that i don't properly understand how a freaking flash drive works .

Can someone here explain any solutions as to how i can fix my problem ? how to recreate the boot sector on the drive ? how to define its filesystem ?

If u think u can help me please get in contact with me over email ...

[ua549]

If the OS is Windows, you are probably removing the drive without first stopping it via the "safely remove hardware" command.

[Hareth]

no i do that whenever i`m removing it from the PC

[ua549]

Does the unit work on another system? How old is the unit?
Flash memory has a finite limit on the number of read/write cycles.
They do wear out.