"READ ONLY" USB drives

[Dellboy]

hi all,
has anyone ever come across a problem where a USB stick becomes read only and have you ever found a way to put it back to normal,

the back story is i had a Gigabyte motherboard that randomly would disconnect USB drives plugged into the USB 3.0 ports, it only did that while saving data to the drive, i would then be left with a read only drive that no matter what i tried i could never format or delete or add new files onto it, at first i thought it must be a problem with the drives then after about the 5th one i realised it was the motherboard, I have pretty much tried every little utility I've found on the internet and they all say drive is read only and fail, my next thought was try flashing the firmware on the drives but that does not seem to be available anywhere, Kingston, Sandisk, Corsair and Adata firmwares for USB drives are nowhere to be found

Thanks in advance and everyone please stay safe for the sake of your loved ones during this Covid situation

[einstein9]

I believe this is a controller issue, maybe you can start here:

http://flashboot.ru/index.php?name=iflash (try the files section)

download the proper tool based on ur flash, and factory wipe fresh

will take some time reading before you actually find the good working one

[HaQue]

hi all,
has anyone ever come across a problem where a USB stick becomes read only and have you ever found a way to put it back to normal,

the back story is i had a Gigabyte motherboard that randomly would disconnect USB drives plugged into the USB 3.0 ports, it only did that while saving data to the drive, i would then be left with a read only drive that no matter what i tried i could never format or delete or add new files onto it, at first i thought it must be a problem with the drives then after about the 5th one i realised it was the motherboard, I have pretty much tried every little utility I've found on the internet and they all say drive is read only and fail, my next thought was try flashing the firmware on the drives but that does not seem to be available anywhere, Kingston, Sandisk, Corsair and Adata firmwares for USB drives are nowhere to be found

Thanks in advance and everyone please stay safe for the sake of your loved ones during this Covid situation

It is because firmware updating is built into the device as an added extra. Usually they come from the factory mass produced and written with jigs that access the USB in a way you normally don't.

if you try messing with the firmware with utilities from places like Flashboot.ru or USBDev.ru then you are playing on the wild wild west of the internet and YMMV. Be wary of malware, very wary!

A colleague had a smart TV that would kill USB drives and USB external drives. he would lose sometimes 1 a week. He bought a powered USB hub and attached that to the TV and apparently he hasn't had trouble since, though this is a single anecdote and could just be correlation not causation.

BTW, firmware rarely fixes flash drives.

[Dellboy]

Thanks for advice, it only really tends to happen if I'm a large amount of writing data to the sticks, I stopped using the motherboard when I realised it was a problem with the USB ports, memory sticks are cheap enough anyway, I was just wondering if there was any easy solution, I can use them to keep my hammer entertained lol

[jeremyb]

When you say read only mode it generally can mean two things..

1. The data on the drive is still accessible however new information cannot be written to it.
I find this is because there is some instability between the computer and the flash drive. specifically I see it when I'm trying to reverse engineer working flash drives and there is some kind of interference ie: signal noise during write operations. I assume the controller detects this and locks itself in read only mode to prevent corruption of data. I could see the same happening if the UFD is continually disconnected while writing.

2. The drive is only showing up as a removable media device.
What HaQue said.

[Dellboy]

Exactly, that's what is happening, I see whats on it and access it, just can't add anything new or format, it comes up with an error,
drive is read only