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Little me
Asked: 2016-03-16 07:37:58 +0800 CST

Bricked USB Thumb Drive - Can it be revived?

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I have a Kingston DataTraveler 3.1 64GB Thumb Drive. It is now a tiny brick, but unlike other bricked thumb drives in other questions...

Nautilus, Gparted and Disks do not see it. No recognition of its insertion or removal seems to take place, yet...

lsusb

reports:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:0159 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTS5159 Card Reader Controller
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0951:1666 Kingston Technology DataTraveler G4
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0c45:62c0 Microdia Sonix USB 2.0 Camera
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 045e:00e1 Microsoft Corp. Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 Reciever
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

That's it identified at the second entry. Can this be made to work? Does Ubuntu remember it and name it or is it reporting it's name and therefore not COMPLETELY bricked?

The drive is similarly ignored on a Mac but, to my immediate surprise, Windoze has recognised it! I nearly didn't check. It sees it as 0 bytes and unformatted, but offers to format it. I haven't tried yet. Anyone care to work out why Windows does better in this case and tell me if this can be revived using Linux. From memory, there are encoded backups on there, but I don't mind losing the data. This is now just a learning/teaching Linux opportunity. There is a chance that this has been an encrypted drive that I could guess the password for...

Thanks!

edit for @Mark Williams and other interested parties: dmesg reports:

[36773.888116] usb 1-4: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
[36774.201457] usb 1-4: New USB device found, idVendor=0951, idProduct=1666
[36774.201471] usb 1-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[36774.201479] usb 1-4: Product: DataTraveler 3.0
[36774.201486] usb 1-4: Manufacturer: Kingston
[36774.201493] usb 1-4: SerialNumber: 94DE807246B3EF5159B6E02F
[36774.202512] usb-storage 1-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[36774.203011] scsi7 : usb-storage 1-4:1.0
[36775.291961] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[36775.293850] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[36776.972191] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] 122915328 512-byte logical blocks: (62.9 GB/58.6 GiB)
[36776.972949] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[36776.972965] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[36776.973696] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
[36776.973712] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[36777.014732]  sdc: sdc1
[36777.022713] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
encryption

2 Answers

    1. Please try to find your USB drive with "lsusb", if found,
    2. You may try to use dd command to make it nullified "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx bs=8M", change XXX with your USB thumb drive ID as found by "lsusb" command.
    3. Try gparted to find it and reformat it with your preferred file system.

    Ref: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=148756

    1. Finally, if Windows can handle it, let it do so.

    Hope it helps!!

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  2. If the drive is on sdc & the system can't see it, there's a fair chance the partition table is damaged.
    You can use fdisk (& I'm picking this as gparted fails) to re-write that - from the command line, type sudo fdisk /dev/sdc, which brings up a new prompt; type 'g' to create a new GPT table, then 'w' to write it out, re-do the sudo fdisk /dev/sdc line & type 'p' to print the table - hopefully this will produce a sensible response, & 'n' will be able to add a new partition. If it does, then just accept default start/ end values, 'w'rite it again & see if you can create a formatted drive with sudo mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdc1
    If successful, your system may well auto-mount it - or show a new drive icon for you to select.

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