USB Flash Drive identified as "USB Hub" - why?

stockhausen

stockhausen

stockhausen

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I have a ½GB Corsair Flash Voyager Flash Drive.
I copied some MP3 files to it and tried using it on a music system.
When I put in the flash drive it was rejected with the message ""USB Hubs are unsupported".
I tried formatting it as FAT32 but that didn't help.
By chance I subsequently wanted to use it to save some scanned documents on a Multifunction printer / scanner.
Again it was rejected because it appears to be a USB Hub.
In both instances a different USB flash drive is accepted and works perfectly well and the Corsair Flash Voyager works perfectly well on a PC.

Does anyone have any idea why a USB flash drive might be identified as a USB Hub and how to stop that happening?
 
This sounds like a hardware issue.
The flash drive is (3.1 ?) so super new tech.
I will assume that the printer and music system are old tech.
USB pen drives are supposed to be backwards compatible (its baked into the usb spec).

In reality cheap hardware tech takes shortcuts and doesn't always adhere to the spec or plan for future compatibility.
Your printer and music system just don't like the new tech.
The USB drive that works fine is mostly likely an older drive.
 
No, quite the opposite; the printer is less than a year old and is a current model, the DAB Tuner on which I initially tried to use the flash drive is bang up-to-date (i.e. straight out of the box) and the 491MB Corsair Flash Voyager Flash Drive is one I have had lying about for years.

Right, I have now formatted it as NTFS (495MB) and it has made no difference. It must be some characteristic of the actual flash drive :confused:
 
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From my opening post - "I tried formatting it as FAT32 but that didn't help."
For what it is worth, I have now found another ancient Corsair Flash Voyager Flash Drive and it behaves in exactly the same way. - it HAS to be a characteristic of these items.
 
Continuing this strange saga, there have been further developments:
  • I have returned and replaced the "music player" which includes the facility to play .MP3s and .FLACs from a USB Flash Drive - the new one also sees the ½GB Corsair Flash Drive as a "USB Hub".
  • I found a second ½GB Corsair Flash Drive lieing about and have tried that in both the Multifunction printer / scanner and the music system - it was also rejected.
  • Both of the ½GB Corsair Flash Drives work absolutely fine in my PC.
  • I have tried using a 64GB Corsair Flash Voyager Flash Drive and that works fine on both the music player and the Multifunction printer / scanner.
I no longer really care whether I can get the smaller flash drives to work but I am just very puzzled . . .
 
leezer3 said:
They probably did something funny to get the encrypted drive features working.

Sounds normal to me.
Click to expand...
In what way "normal"?

I have quite a few flash drives from a variety of suppliers (e.g. Sandisk, Kingston, Optima and various "Promotional" flash drives); none of them manifest the same problem, even other more recent higher capacity Corsair flash drives.
 
Normal :p
There are various ways to encrypt a whole USB drive, and it really depends on the specific drive (and for that matter what they bought in that week...)

I've seen drives with hidden partitions, drives which identify as a hub & 2 internal drives (one containing the decryption software) & all sorts.
 
Thanks for that - sort of - I'm not quite sure why it is relevant. My USB Flash Drives never have been encrypted in any way at all so far as I am aware and they seem absolutely fine with various generations of Windows on my PC (I will try it with Linux at the weekend).

What I really want to know is how I can stop my two 500MB Corsair Flash Drives being classified as USB-Hubs and make them usable on other devices :(

ps - I really should try them in my car to see if they work there . . .
 
how are these drives categorised on your windows system (device properties etc) does it see them as hubs too (even though they can be read/written)

- they are pretty old though ! not going to fit many songs
 
They're probably that old that they're being picked up differently to how newer flash drives would be.

For half a gb i'd chuck them in the bin. I don't think i've got any sticks that are less than 4Gb now.
 
It could just be the way the hardware has been manufactured. A lot of USB storage devices are actually just bargain bin mini or micro SD cards which have been re-purposed as flash drives. Hard-wire them onto a "card reader" chip, shove a USB head on it and you have a cheap USB flash drive which is technically a card reader, or a "USB hub"!
 
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