Fungi4All <fungil...@protonmail.com> writes: > Wild guess would be to use gparted and delete all partitions then > use dd if=/dev/zero 128000x1024 or more and see what the firmware would > do. > I think it would reset itself once everything is deleted from it and > refilled with 0 > blocks to the max. I don't think you can digitally hurt these things till > they > mechanically fail and can't write anymore. They will not delete data on > their > own unless instructed specifically to do so.
This issue is deeper as the controller in the thumb drive no longer knows where the media resides. $sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: No medium found that is exactly what you also get if you use dd to either write to /dev/sdc or read from it. Other people using MSWindows state that the drive shows up as empty and they are prompted to insert a disk (neat trick.) so different operating systems complain in slightly different ways, but the upshot is that the on-board controller has no idea any longer where data are stored hince the "no medium found" condition. With all the tinkering that goes on in Linux, I am surprised nobody has come up with a set of utilities as I bet many of these thumb drives have similar microcode or similar structures for allowing the thumb drive to reset it's controller. Since eprom has a finite number of write cycles, the controllers cleverly shift write jobs around so data are written to different memory cells when possible. I expect the best I can hope for is to reset it to defaults so the drive will appear empty but can then be repartitioned and used again. Martin McCormick