The drive in question is a Lacie "iamakey" 16gb usb 2 drive which as of 24 hours was working, and hand been working for years - device manager in XP gives limited information for the items from the drop down box (I don't know of a way to get more detailed information --- perhaps the fact that device manager in windows gives limited information (or maybe is showing nonsensical hardware ID information such as:
USBSTOR\DiskLaCie___iamaKey_________0.00
USBSTOR\DiskLaCie___iamaKey_________
USBSTOR\DiskLaCie___
USBSTOR\LaCie___iamaKey_________0
LaCie___iamaKey_________0
USBSTOR\GenDisk
GenDisk
will allow someone to pick up on a reason for the fault).
Windows 7 and Windows XP give a similar error messages when the drive is inserted into a usb port, to the effect of "The disk in drive X isn't formatted...".
Question restated is: How can I recover the data that's on it, or otherwise restore it to a working condition/figure out why it failed?
- I've used different ports on different machines.
- used testdisk: didn't find any partitions/wrote to MBR - problem still there
- I elected to reformat the drive - after doing so, it now appears to work normally.