Is my USB drive still revive-able?

Is my USB drive still revive-able?
Posted by Logan on 11 Jul, 2022 15:14
Hi, a sad story today.

I ejected and unplugged my 32GB HP USB flash drive, then remember something not yet finished, so I plugged it in again, and it not show properly.

I found out the port is having bad connection, so I changed it to a good port, and it remain problematic.

In gnome-disk-utility, device shows correctly as /dev/sda, but no partition.

When try to format it in gnome-disk-utility, an error message says: "Error wiping device: Failed to probe the device 'dev/sda' (udisks-error-quark, 0)"

Tried to format it on an Android device with OTG, but the "formatting" screen just shows forever.

When trying "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda", it always stuck after some time, I guess that's the buffer running out and nothing ever written to it.

When trying "sudo dmesg | grep sda", here's the related output:

[ 975.393443] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 61440000 512-byte logical blocks: (31.5 GB/29.3 GiB)
[ 975.393561] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 975.393564] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[ 975.393682] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

[ 975.395149] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
[ 975.395154] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current]
[ 975.395157] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
[ 975.395160] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[ 975.395163] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0
[ 975.395172] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 0, async page read

The above 6 lines repeat 8 more times (total 9x)

[ 975.398753] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
[ 975.398757] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current]
[ 975.398760] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
[ 975.398762] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 18 00 00 08 00
[ 975.398763] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 24 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0
[ 975.398767] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 3, async page read
[ 975.399256] sda: unable to read partition table
[ 975.399934] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk

So, do you think I should try anything more to revive it, or is it completely died?
Thank you!

#1 Reply
Posted by Zenith on 20 Jul, 2022 09:43
Is there valuable data on it?

If so, you could try this. Mac and Windows only, there may be Linux equivalents, I haven't looked.

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/flashdrive-recovery/repair-usb-drive-and-recover-data.html

or there are data recovery companies, but they charge a lot.

If it's just a 32GB USB stick that's acting up, they are so cheap it's not worth wasting time on. If you did get it to start to behave, it shouldn't be trusted.