Sandisk USB Flash Drive Dead

Bought a Sandisk Cruzer USB 512 MB on 9/7/2005. It died, returned and replaced 9/23/2005. Tats one died on about 10/10/2005 and I exchanged it for a 1 GB, then the 1 gig died on 10/15/2005.
I use it on a HP/Compaq nx9010 laptop and an AOpen 2.8 desktop. The second one that went belly-up was tried on a different machine, same message "USB Device Not Recognized "
Does Sandisk have a bad run of chips or is one of my machines killing these dongles?

 

It could be a driver problem. Do you have the latest drivers for your os?
Its hard to say what the problem is, but you should contact support and see if they are aware of a problem, or maybe make them aware that there is a problem. You have alot of patience. I would've just got my $ back at this point.

 

I plugged it into one of my employee's Gateway laptop and it was dead there, also. The dongle had never been on her machine, so it doesn't look like a driver problem. I like the Titanium, it has a metal case, seems like it would be durable. The last PNY plastic one I had got run over by my truck and it still worked, though!

I may have to get my $ back and try a different brand.

Can I delete all the USB devices or drivers in Device Manager and reboot and let XP load them up as needed again? Done that with the HDD drivers on an old Win98 machine and never did get it up again.

 

I had a Lexar that died, and the light no longer came on. Does your light on the "dongle" come on?
On your coworker's laptop, I assume it is running XP. Does XP provide the drivers for this model? If not, it won't work until you download and install the drivers from the sandisk website

 

Epinions reviews
Did not reveal anything terribly alarming, but there were not many there.


But your problem is not unique

 

Talked to a techie at SanDisk, he finally concluded the flash drive was bad. He had me delete all instances of "vid_0781" that I could from registry. Guess I'll make another trip to Office Depot.

No, the light will not come on. I don't think any 3rd party drivers are available or needed for XP, only for Win98.

 

Killed another drive, this makes the 4th one. It lasted about a week. I exchanged it for a PNY 1 gig, I'll see what that one does.

 

Hopefully there's nothing about your computer that is "killing" these drives.
I couldn't think off hand what could cause it, but maybe someone else might know if this is possible(and likely)

 

i think the devices are simply made cheap.