I have a 128 GB thumb drive which has been sitting in a drawer for 2 or 3 years because it is not completely dead but had a traumatic event.
It worked fine until the night it accidentally got over-filled after a backup script tried to put this drive's own file system back in to it in an infinite recursive loop which is what you get when one forgets to exclude the mount point. Of course, what should have happened was a "Write failed" condition but what actually happened seems to be that the controller in the Kingston drive lost track of where to put anything so it now can't even find the SDRAM that makes up the "disk." The drive makes the /dev/sdX node as one might expect but any attempt to read or write the node such as to reformat it or use fdisk on it fails with a "no medium found" message. Since this was a backup drive, I simply got another drive and backed up to it so I just want to be able to use this drive again since the failure is probably not due to actual hardwarefailure but could be called a design flaw since the drive should protect itself from this sort of issue. Has the state of the art improved any recently so that Linux users have any tools that can unstick the Kingston's controller? The data are probably not of any importance any longer but the drive probably cost close to $100 when it was new and it seems so close to being usable. Any constructive ideas are appreciated. Here is what syslog shows when the drive is inserted: audio2 kernel: [82157.422619] usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd kernel: [82157.734651] usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 3 using uhci_hcd kernel: [82157.909640] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=13fe, idProduct=3100 kernel: [82157.913558] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 kernel: [82157.917858] usb 1-1: Product: 2233 PRAM kernel: [82157.920367] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: kernel: [82157.987815] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected kernel: [82157.999983] scsi2 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0 kernel: [82158.010244] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage kernel: [82159.011680] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access 2233 PRAM 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS kernel: [82159.037067] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 kernel: [82159.063686] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk