How to recover a corrupt USB stick [SOLVED - sort of: it's beyond rescue]

[br1anstorm]

Hello ricardo

Thanks for that further suggestion.... but I fear that the situation is beyond recovery. Having followed the steps suggested by scjet45, it looks as if absolutely everything which might have been on that USB stick has been wiped or removed, including any remaining partition-table information and the MBR.

So the USB drive simply doesn't appear AT ALL now in either Disks, or in GParted. If I can't "see" it, I can't do anything to it.

I also tried sudo fdisk -l in the terminal. The USB drive wasn't found there either. It seems to be completely invisible now. So - with thanks for all the ideas - I think I must finally give up.

[ricardogroetaers]

If even if you insert the drive into another USB port, it (the drive) does not appear, then it burns or has poor contact.
This has nothing to do with partition table or MBR, GPT and other partitions.

[br1anstorm]

Hi ricardo

I hate being beaten by a piece of electronic machinery.... so I inserted the USB stick into another spare laptop which has Mint as its OS.

I launched Disks.... and the USB drive showed up! Sandisk Ultra, 31GB contents unknown....

So I tried your suggestions: clicked on the three lines 'hamburger' icon, selected 'format' with the options you recommended....

Up came an error message:
"Error formatting disk. Error erasing device: error writing 1048576 bytes to /dev/sdb: Input output error (udisks-error-quark,0)"

And strangely, a third disk icon then appeared in the Disks listing. The main 250GB hard disk drive is still there, the troublesome Sandisk Ultra 31GB is there.... and there is also an icon titled "Block Device /dev/sdb" whose display simply says size 0.0kb and the volume is "empty".

Surely this is a lost cause?

[MartyMint]

You should not spare any time or effort in getting this thing to work.
Don't give up just yet.

[Baldlygo]

I've just come on this thread as a last result having a 1TB USB which refused to mount with a superblock problem. I had decided to reformat and say goodbye to my 600G of video recordings I tried one last thing using gparted. I reduced the size of the single EXT4 partition. Having completed the task OK I found I could mount the drive again and copy my files off if needed. My problem solved

ps - perhaps I spoke too soon - the drive does take a long time to umount now

[wangjih]

hi br1anstorm, and everybody,
I revive the subject because it could be helping other people 's problem with "so called bad usb"
I played a lot with usb3-32G of different marks (one kingston,one sandisk,4 from essentiels a local supplier ) with very large size file ( 11 to 15 GB) essentially mac's rootfs (I am building virtual liveMac on usb using modified Foxlet's osx-kvm .
Today my sandisk -which worked wonderfully- suddenly claimed to be only 4GB size !!!! gdisk,fdisk or gparted do not see the rest ; dd /dev/zero to whole device won't change anything. cp or rsync show of course limitation to 4G.
I put my sandisk as media in my virtual mac
(just add one line -drive file=/dev/sdb,media=disk,format=raw ) added to qemu 'args cmdline
no need to cumbersome usb passthru. guess what ? diskutil utility does recognise my sandisk as
31GB... and I could partition it as any new usb 32G !!!!!
Of course you could do the same on a real genuine Mac . (but build a virtual mac does not take you
more than 2-3h even for the first time ,and you have it at home.)
So hope you save your old sticks in some drawings
wangjh
https:__sourceforge.net/projects/toysbox/files/MacFunOnLinux/

[mikeflan]

Thanks for the post, but your link is no good.
This might be the correct link, but I'm not sure:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/toysbo ... unOnLinux/