From: marti...@suddenlink.net 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.
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. Here is a surprising experience. Recently I asked the store to give me a few of the cheapest and nastiest usb sticks, 8Gb if they had. The usb3 16Gb were only a buck more. So I got identical sitting side by side on the rack Intenso 16Gb usb3. I installed a system with 3 partitions on the one, booted configured and wanted to make a backup with settings for network for a seconf machine. So I used dd if=sdc of=sdd I go in and check and there were a whole bunch of Mb more on the second drive with no partition while the partitions that copied seemed identical. So I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure out the error caused by dd if I had randomly used the second as first and the first as second. I think they are like uuids, there are no two identical usb drives ever.
