Corrupt USB Thumbdrive?

[Jerry N]

I have some USB thumbdrives from various manufacturers that have been used as bootable USB sticks using the Mint "USB Image Writer". I would like to use them as normal data drives and can format them to Fat 32 or ext4 using gparted. However, they will not mount, either in Mint 17.3 or Windows 7. Windows 7 offers to format the thumbdrive but the format fails. gparted does not give any indication of a problem when I delete the partition and create a new one. I find that they can be used again as bootable USB sticks even they they won't mount as data drives. What am I missing here?

Jerry

[trytip]

open gparted it and scroll to select your thumb-drive so you don't format a storage drive
in menu Partition/Unmount if it's mounted
in menu Device/Create Partition Table and use msdos (should already be selected, hit APPLY
in menu Partition/New and for file system scroll to fat32 or leave ext4; choose a label name if you want and hit APPLY icon

exit gparted and your flash drive should be in your filemanager

[Jerry N]

to trytip:

I had tried what you suggested before but I tried again. This time I got one USB drive (PNY, 128gb) back in mountable condition but another (Sandisk 16gb) will still not mount and cannot be mounted. I am quite sure that I initially reformatted this drive using the Mint USB Stick Formatter. Could this be part of the problem? The thumbdrive is not dead, I can still create an image on it using Mint USB Image Writer.

Jerry

[trytip]

did you maybe LOCK the sandisk?

[Jerry N]

The Sandisk is a USB Sandisk Cruzer, not an SD card. No Lock.
Besides that, it can be programmed as a bootable USB stick using Image Write.

Jerry

[Jerry N]

Continuing the investigation - I have a Silicon Power 128gb USB drive that I had used for Mint 18 beta live. I attempted to return it to use using gparted in Mint 18 Mate. In Mint 18, gparted reports this thing as being 500gb plus and would not create a new partition table. I rebooted Mint 17.3 (Mate) and was able to quickly create a proper partition table and partition. It mounts now as a normal USB data stick. Still no joy in redoing the 16gb Sandisk Cruzer though.

This points out another reason that Mint 18 is not ready for prime time. I had already decided not to use Mint 18 because its video playback performance is much worse than with Mint 17.3 (on the same computer).

So I guess my problem is half solved.

Jerry

[Mute Ant]

"What am I missing here?" I guess you have not cleared the ISO9660 header. This is not something that gparted or USB Formatter will do for you. This Google search may help...

• site:https://forums.linuxmint.com $((2048*512))

...and there is a command for doing this...wipefs...without changing the rest of the drive.

Code: Select all

$ sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdc
wipefs: WARNING: /dev/sdc: appears to contain 'dos' partition table
5 bytes were erased at offset 0x8001 (iso9660)
they were: 43 44 30 30 31
wipefs: WARNING: /dev/sdc: appears to contain 'dos' partition table

[Jerry N]

Mute Ant --- I tried the wipefs, got the same response you show in your example. This 16gb Sandisk Cruzer still won't mount.
This will be the second USB thumbdrive I have had to dumpster in the last few months. Fortunately thumbdrives are cheap, especially the small ones.


Jerry

[Metal Mick]

I've had this same issue myself, and I've struggled with it, even where I've repartitioned and formatted in Windows, where I could add and delete files.

Often, after a reboot of my Mint machine, I found success with writing to the drive.

In Mint 18, I've found that Menu > Preferences > Disks will work. I have just tried it on a drive I set up as bootable, in Mint. I was able to delete the partitions, rename and reformat the drive within this utility, and get a drive that I can read from and write to.