USB drive died  

RE: USB drive died

Recently I had my USB drive get corrupted, but there was nothing wrong with the actual hardware.  Others have posted seeing weird things.  I believe it was a software bug, but I'm not sure if it was in the printer or in the Prusa Connect web application.  Hopefully they have resolved it.  I suggest that you try formatting your USB drive and see if it really has failed or if it was just data corruption.

Posted by: @docben

Hi- my USB drive died, not a big deal but I lost the shape files. Also- anyone know of any generic shape files (one's that are helpful to add to a model in slicer)?

RE: USB drive died

I purchased two MK4's and just had one of the USB drives fail as well. It is definitely the USB drive as I'm always sure to eject it properly from my PC when copying files to it. This specific USB drive would often encounter read errors, and I would need to format it regularly, but finally it just let go and even after a clean format gets errors when copying files to it. I believe the USB drives they supply are pretty low quality, as the write speeds are painfully slow compared to other USB drives I've tried (same PC, same files). They do look cool though with the Prusa logo.

RE: USB drive died

I think my Prusa USB drive kind of died...? The 3D printer can't read any files on it. After having to format it on my PC, I can copy files over to it (and read them via the PC) but the drive still appears empty when inserting it into the Prusa. Oh well. 

RE: USB drive died

That is how mine started, but you may also be encountering the bug I noticed when the MK4 reads the drives. Did you try going up to the top parent directory on the MK4 (ie: continue to select the two dots at the top of the file listings)? I noticed that if you change the directory structure on the USB drive the MK4 will show an empty directory when you reinsert the drive as is is trying to read from the previous directory before you removed the drive. For example if my USB drive had a directory structure like:

Foo->Dog

If I was previously browsing files in the Dog directory, removed the drive and changed the directory structure to Foo->Cat, then when reinserting the drive I would get an empty file listing. If I select the two dots to backup a directory then it would show the files in Foo correctly. If I had changed the directory to Boo->Cat though the first time around, I would need to backup twice on the file listings. Weird bug to me, but they should just start listing at the top level to avoid this problem.

Printers do not have the range of characters available to a computer, you may have megabytes of unicode characters available, far more than your printer - so if your filer is using unicode for things like spaces and punctuation in filenames it may be unreadable by the printer.  Keep to the basic ASCII subset and you should be OK.

Cheerio,

RE: USB drive died

My USB drive got extremely hot and wouldn't read until I rebooted the printer.

I think it would have broken if I hadn't reset the printer.

RE: USB drive died

I'm only using ASCII characters in my filenames, as I only know English :). It was definitely a bad USB drive in my case though, as the same set of files work fine on other USB drives in the printer.

Posted by: @diem

Printers do not have the range of characters available to a computer, you may have megabytes of unicode characters available, far more than your printer - so if your filer is using unicode for things like spaces and punctuation in filenames it may be unreadable by the printer.  Keep to the basic ASCII subset and you should be OK.

Cheerio,

RE: USB drive died

I'm not going to argue with you if your USB drive is toast or not. Rather you were asking (in part) for the demo files that came on the USB stick. Prusa supplies those demo files for most of their printers here: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/sample-g-codes_529630