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What I did

I tried installing Debian on my USB stick, and it got stuck with an error in mid-process. Since then, I am not able to format the drive anymore or to mount it.

Apparently, the drive has no partitions and no partition table and nothing to work with.

What still works

When launching GParted, it sometimes still shows the correct last file system used with the (probably) correct amount of used space. I can still write it using raw commands like cp and dd (tested with cp and a Debian live .iso file)

What I tried

I tried all kind of checks, repairs and formatting operations on Windows and Linux with all kind of tools.

  • Windows format: "Windows was unable to complete the formatting"
  • Diskpart clean: "DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified."
  • Disk Management: "The system cannot find the file specified."
  • GParted system check: "/dev/sdc: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors ********** e2fsck 1.43.5 (04-Aug-2017)e2fsck: No such device or address while trying to re-open /dev/sdc"

  • GParted format to ext4: "Create new ext4 file system 00:00:00 ( ERROR ) mkfs.ext4 -F -L "" /dev/sdb 00:00:00 ( ERROR ) mke2fs 1.43.4 (31-Jan-2017) The file /dev/sdb does not exist and no size was specified. libparted messages ( INFO ) Input/output error during write on /dev/sdb Input/output error during write on /dev/sdb Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb: Input/output error Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb: Input/output error"

  • I tried a lot of other tools but the didn't provide any useful error messages

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    Bin it & buy a new one. They're not worth fighting once they start to fail. If there's a write error, the firmware protect can kick in & render it useless. See superuser.com/questions/1125282/…
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 30, 2017 at 19:41
  • @Tetsujin I'll do that if I can't fix it until the shops open again. The thing is I don't think it's broken since I can still write data to it and reading also kinda works. I really think it's only the file system that's corrupt, not the device.
    – piegames
    Commented Dec 30, 2017 at 20:18
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    I get through hundreds, if not thousands of these things for work. Golden rule: don't bother fighting it. You do & 2 days later you've a 120 mile call-out cos it failed again. Not worth it.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 30, 2017 at 20:19
  • As @Tetsujin has said, likely the stick has a hardware failure (controller got confused for some reason). You can get more meaningful error messages with dmesg under Linux, likely you'll see USB errors, or the stick will disappear while writing to it.
    – dirkt
    Commented Jan 2, 2018 at 8:54
  • Possible duplicate of What can I do if my USB flash drive is write-protected or read-only?
    – Tetsujin
    Commented May 3, 2019 at 8:22

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