Sunday, May 23, 2010

death of a USB flash drive

The Transcend JF220 finally gave up the ghost. After all, it was being used every day. Putting it in Linux or Windows showed an unpartitioned free space. I suppose the partition table got wiped. Tried Recuva as the first step. It could not read. Then tried formatting. Windows complained that it was write-protected - 'Windows was unable to complete the format' and 'The drive cannot be formatted'. Tried various tips for getting over that by registry edits. Did not work. Tried formatting in Linux, gparted complained that it could not write the disk label. Tried wiping the first and last bytes as in the script at itrc.hp.com by doing
sfdisk -s
manually and then using that number in
off_t=`sfdisk -s $1`
(( off_t = off_t - 1024 ))

echo "Zap the first megabyte of the device."
echoeval "dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1k count=1024"
echo "Zap the last megabyte of the device."
echoeval "dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1k count=1024 seek=$off_t"
Still no go - the dd took a long time and then said completed, but apparently it was failing. Tried Transcend's own repartition tool from transcendusa.com, that also failed. Concluding that it was a hardware failure.

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