fat32 usb turned RAW Gparted:input output error and now it isn't in mount devices at all no solutions worked

Question

The device is not visible under the section Mount Devices in Parted Magic, nor in my mini-install of Windows XP.

I've tried several things to fix the 16GB flash drive, which is a Kingston Data Traveler 2.0, like formatting, assigning disk letters, re-installing drivers (while it was still visible) and fdisk -l in Parted Magic.

Still, lsusb does show it.

root@PartedMagic:~# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0951:1665 Kingston Technology 

I think I've also tried to use all the options available in Disk Shredder in Parted Magic, but now it says No drives have been detected.

Gparted says input output error, and I have to Ignore or Retry forever, and then it says couldn't open dev/sda because no such file or directory exists, as well as An error occured while creating partition table (it says I have to make one and it is showing the flash drive as unallocated).

Right after the failed attempt, Gparted stops seeing it anymore, and so does lsusb also. However, after plugging the USB flash drive into the USB port again, it is seen by them, and the Mount devices window shows up like it has detected some device to mount - still, Kingston isn't visible there.

I'm currently out of ideas because everything I've tried has failed, and when I search for solutions I can only find ones similar to what I've already tried - and failed at.

Please note that I'm not after the data I just want the device to work again.

Answer 1

Most probably the shredding algorithm destroyed the flash by accessing some part of the flash extensively.

Disk shredder says: "File Shredder supports multiple shredding algorithms up to 7 passes, US government compliant DoD 5220-22.M, Guttman method, shell integration on right click in Windows".

For future shredding: To erase data from flash securely it is enough, when you do full format or fill flash with a large file / or both. There is not any method how to recover data back as there is no magnetic part as in classic HDD and no background magnetic noise could be used to recover data.

Update: If the error was present even before DS and Gparted fails, possible the stick is toasted. This can happen when

1. You exceed certain number of writes to the same memory cell (flash is destroyed)
2. You write inconsistently to some memory cell, what could be caused by disconnecting flash during write. (you need special utils to reset flash)

With current price of the USB flash disk, you can just buy another one, otherwise you can try to reset flash by this utils: (http://flashboot.ru/iflash/). Browse this by google translator, source is in russian (http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=cs&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fflashboot.ru%2Fiflash%2F), identify your flash (if present) and use utils in section Files.