[ale] Bricked a usb stick?

[Justin Goldberg]

I've rescued usb drives from being under-formatted by overwriting it
with a file larger than the drive size (like the swapfile) with
win32diskimager, and then being able to format it. The HP Drive Key
Utility would probably work too in this fashion. I imagine that
there's a linux equivalent, but that's beyond my current knowledge.


On 6/21/12, Jim Lynch <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
> I was preparing a PNY 4 Gb usb drive as a bootable Linux drive.  It
> wouldn't boot reliably on an old Dell OptiPlex computer so I
> repartitioned it and made a 2 Gb fat 16 partition on it.  That worked
> fine.  I then used unetbootin to create a bootable drive.  No errors.  I
> booted the computer and it didn't find the drive.  I then plugged it
> into a running system and got the following from dmesg:
>
> [5269333.709170] sd 30:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
> [5269333.718771] sd 30:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [5269369.349249] usb 1-8: USB disconnect, address 19
> [5269379.580344] usb 1-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and
> address 20
> [5269379.732967] usb 1-7: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
> [5269379.735289] scsi31 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
> [5269379.736431] usb-storage: device found at 20
> [5269379.736440] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
> [5269384.731600] usb-storage: device scan complete
> [5269384.733097] scsi 31:0:0:0: Direct-Access     XXXXXXXX
> U167CONTROLLER   0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
> [5269384.738849] sd 31:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
> [5269384.749740] sd 31:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [5269390.304767] usb 1-7: USB disconnect, address 20
>
> Even though it mentions sdd there is no /dev/sdd.  I tried it in two
> other systems, running Ubuntu and  Centos and none of the systems
> detected a device.
>
> Is there a way I can recover this thing?  It's almost new.  Since it
> never appears as a device, I can't dd or fdisk it.
>
> Jim.
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