Strange crash with new usb flash drive

[Feathers McGraw]

I got a new 64GB USB flash drive today (Kingston Digital USB 3.0 DataTraveler Mini / DTM30) . When I plugged it in it was recognised as normal, and I clicked "open with file manager" in the "available devices" menu in the tray...and then the KDE workspace froze. None of the normal menus or the desktop responded.

The only other program that was running at the time was Firefox, which continued to work as normal. I forced a shutdown and tried again, and the same thing happened.

Third time round I didn't mount it. Instead, I opened KDE Partition Manager and formatted the drive. Originally it was FAT32 and had flags of "boot" and something else, I deleted it and made a new FAT32 partition. It then mounted properly and has been working fine ever since.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? That boot flag is making me think the drive could have had a setup utility that was trying to do something clever that wasn't working. I can't think why else it would freeze up like that.

[MoonRise]

Is it one of those "secure" types? Most of those have weird formats and setups to secure it and most of the time just for Windows systems. I have a type that actually encrypts the "working" partition with a passcode and it actually came with the unlocker for Windows AND Linux. I was happy about that.

[Feathers McGraw]

I know the kind of thing you mean, I had an unpleasant experience with a Western Digital passport drive and its ridiculous "SmartWare" virtual CD on the firmware.

That's great that they wrote an unlocker for Linux. Which company was it?

As far as I can tell this flash drive wasn't supposed to have anything like that on it. I don't get why it had a boot flag?!

[MoonRise]

The one I have that has the unlocker for Linux is the Kingston DataTraveler Vault Privacy. I know doesn't really help ID why yours behaved as such since, well, both are Kingston. That is odd.

[vinnywright]

I know the kind of thing you mean, I had an unpleasant experience with a Western Digital passport drive and its ridiculous "SmartWare" virtual CD on the firmware.

I have a sandisk with it's U3 system virtual CD drive on it ,,,,,,,,I actualy like it ,,,linux has a "u3-tool" that will let you resize the CD part of it (to 0 if you dont like it)OR whatever size you like and you can insert any bootable/or not CD image you want on it ,,,,,

As far as I can tell this flash drive wasn't supposed to have anything like that on it. I don't get why it had a boot flag?!

Me ether as googeling for that model I read some "reviews" and one from a rep that sead thay do not support booting from it ,,,,,,,so why the boot flag hay .

VINNY

[Feathers McGraw]

Me ether as googeling for that model I read some "reviews" and one from a rep that sead thay do not support booting from it ,,,,,,,so why the boot flag hay .

VINNY

I read that review too (Amazon, right?). Doesn't make sense to me. "not supporting booting" seems like a dumbass thing to say, unless your intention is to put people off! I get that they don't want to endorse it but they could have just not said anything.

[GreyGeek]

What I hate about the WD drives is their label, which cannot be removed or changed.

[zeeone]

The first thing done here with thumb drives, is to re-format them to get the junk off them. Just plain hate WD drives, so none in use here.

[Feathers McGraw]

So the general consensus seems to be that WD drives are a bit naff... any WD fanboys hiding out there?

We discovered when tinkering with my WD drive that it uses a proprietary connector, not a SATA job.

I just don't get why companies do things like that, how difficult is it to just conform to the fscking standard?!

[life0riley]

I'm not a WD fanboy, but most of the drives I have are WD. It's only because I am familiar with the brand. I have only had one drive failure. I recently Seagate which has been solid for me so far.

I use enclosures for exterior drives. They are just used for large file backup and are run infrequently. I bought one WD "My Book". I formatted it before using which got rid of the WD software. What good is a 320 GB drive when it is formatted in FAT?