Did the Kali Linux Persistence just destroy my new usb drive?

Question

Sometimes life just doesn't want you to go into a certain direction. Today I decided to get into Kali Linux, so I actually went to the tech-store to buy a 32GB Intenso USB 3.1 flash drive. Since I wanted some persistence on it, I followed the standard documentation to install it and later used Mini Tool Partition Manager to use the remaining space as my persistence storage in ext4, seemingly the standard way of doing this. After I booted up my Kali installation, I used sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. The latter took quite some time, and showed me that some archives were missing I think, I can't fully remember.

So after it was finished I tried to install a package using sudo, but got an error which stated the the user 'kali' couldn't be found or something and the issue would be reported(?). I figured that a restart could maybe fix my problem, but when I shut down the machine the screen showed many error messages with timestamps infront of them rapidly.

Long story short, my brand new flashdrive doesn't get recognised by either the boot-menu, windows explorer, nor commands like lsblk or lsusb on a completely different computer.

How can I find out if the flashdrive is actually broken beyond fixing?

This is my dmesg output after I insert the flash-drive:

[   32.160515] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
[   32.314576] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=090c, idProduct=3267, bcdDevice= 1.00
[   32.314583] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[   32.314588] usb 1-2: Product: SM3269AB MEMORY BAR 
[   32.314592] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Silicon Motion,Inc. 
[   32.316779] usb-storage 1-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[   32.317432] scsi host2: usb-storage 1-2:1.0
[   33.345945] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SMI      USB MEMORY BAR   1000 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[   33.346892] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[   33.347561] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Answer 1

It takes a bit of puzzling to understand what happened.

The message that you got from sudo is probably `

Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

When written in full like this, it should be clear what the problem is: the user kali is not in the sudoers-file and in therefore not allowed to sudo. This will be reported to the sysadmin of the system (which is you), so don't worry about that.

When apt-get shows that archives are missing, run apt-get update –fix-missing or something like that, and repeat the cycle apt-get update; apt-get upgrade. apt-get should leave your system in a consistent state, but I generally like to fix the errors before rebooting.

The fact that WIndows explorer does not recognise the drive is a Windows problem. Windows is not very good in recognizing non-Windows file systems.

You say that lsusb does not see the drive; however, your output from dmesg suggests that the drive is recognized. That is inconsistent and would require a bit of additional examination. Also, the output from dmesg is (to me) strange.

sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0

And specially, the sg1. This is normally sdx, with x a letter. You should then be able to find that device under /dev. So, on your system, is there a /dev/sg1? And if so, what does it say when you fdisk -l /dev/sg1? (take the sg1 from the dmesg output; the actual name might be different next time)

With fdisk, you get the partition table on the flash-drive. If you want to start from the beginning, you can just re-initialize the drive.

Answer 2

There are many fake flash drives around (even store-bought ones). I would test the USB drive to see if it really is a 32GB drive - Google for 'Fake Flash test' to test the drive. Just because it says 32GB under Linux\Windows doesn't mean that it is!