USB stick went to read-only

[earthlingkc]

I have an old Lexmark USB stick formatted as FAT32 that for some reason now only mounts as read only for either Linux or Windows. There is no readonly switch on the stick. I was able to copy data off but now can't even format whether under Linux or Windows, says read only. Tried GParted, hdparm -r0 and other methods, still read only. Tried from two different Linux laptops. Any suggestions?

# sudo umount /dev/sdb1
# sudo dosfsck -a /dev/sdb1
fsck.fat 3.0.28 (2015-05-16)
open: Read-only file system

fsck /dev/sdb1
fsck from util-linux 2.27.1
fsck.fat 3.0.28 (2015-05-16)
open: Read-only file system

hdparm -r0 says it turns off read only but still get read-only errors.

[ClixTrix]

Well, I've had the problem from Windows in the past. Although, I've heard there are some bad controller chips that can cause the problem. Could try this method from Windows:

https://datarecovery.wondershare.com/fl ... drive.html

[Mute Ant]

If you don't mind wiping the drive contents, there's a Gnomey solution...

o Use the Disks accessory to write zeros to the whole drive. Feel free to interrupt it any time after 1MiB has been written.

Disks can be a bit flakey, mine often crashes with a 'quark' error, and it's not a default KDE application at all, so I invented a Minty solution...

o Make a dummy distro... head -c 32M /dev/zero > dummy.iso
oo Use Mint USB Writer to write the dummy.iso to the store.
ooo Use Mint USB Formatter to initialise the drive.

If neither of these work, but you can still read the drive, it's write-life-expired.

[earthlingkc]

Burning an image with USB Image Writer doesn't work, has an error with no explanation.
Tried USB Stick Formatter and it says that it formatted but when mounting it still has old data and still read-only.

Didn't realized USB sticks can expire for writes, I guess that is what happened.