Log drive dead

[flar]

While I had my bike apart today I tried to download all of the logs but the drive was not recognized in 2 computers.  I had previously read it just fine on two occasions on my desktop PC, but today the machine refused to even recognize the drive.

On my Macbook Pro it didn't even blink any lights on the drive and it never showed up on the desktop or under Disk Utility.

On my Win7 desktop it would sometimes show up as an empty drive waiting for media to be inserted or sometimes not at all.  The disk management tab would also not show it, but I could see it listed in the Device Manager's list of disk drives.

Any ideas?  Has anyone else had any issues accessing the drive?

[Jeff]

Whoa, crazy.  I've never had that happen, and I've messed around with the drive quite a bit.  Does the bike itself still boot up and run properly with the drive inserted?  It would be even weirder if the bike thinks the drive is OK and your computers don't.

FYI you can still use the bike and run it without the logger drive inserted, it'll just display an error code the whole time.

Alternately you could use another drive -- did you ever make a backup of the drive's contents?  I found that when I tried to use another USB device as a log drive, the bike would instantly error out unless I duplicated the entire folder structure of the stock Sandisk drive.  You could put another drive in there with the same folder contents and it'd probably work.

[flar]

The bike runs fine with it.  No error codes, but it was displaying the cold battery warning the entire time so it could have just been that the "bad log drive" warning was a lower priority than the cold battery warning.

I'm trying some data recovery tools, but even they have trouble finding the drive.

It's slow going because I usually shut down to remove the drive and try a new experiment (fearing that I'll make it worse by just unplugging it even if it doesn't seem to be shown in the list of drives)...

[7racer]

can you clone an existing flash drive and then someone upload the image to you?

[oml]

I'm trying some data recovery tools, but even they have trouble finding the drive.

Did you try 'dmesg' on your Mac? Assuming it does the same as on Linux it gives you the kernel log messages, which you could filter on words like usb, drive, /dev/sd*, etc.

If that doesnt give you anything the controller ist probably dead. If it recognizes something, but cant mount it the fault ist usually bit in the back (faulty memory chip, corrupt filesystem etc)

But im not sure if dmesg works as well on a Mac, dont own one.

[flar]

I'll try the dmesg, but I don't think it's a bad file system because I believe the behavior would be to offer to reformat the drive for me.  I never get that dialog and if it does show up it is listed as a drive with 0 capacity, which can't be good...