Hey everyone, first time poster.

I have a USB3 flash drive here that has suddenly gone RAW and refuses most attempts to do anything with it. I'm not necessarily interested in the data on it, in an ideal world, I would be able to use the flash drive again (but I realize that's not necessarily possible) but I would like to take this as a learning experience. And at least find out what is wrong with it, just for my curiosity.

The drive is recognized in disk management on the PC everytime, but always RAW.

Things I've done:

Opened the drive with a hex editor, and there does appear to be some data on it.

Attempted to clean the drive and start over with diskpart. Attempting to clean it gives me "DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".

Checking the attributes of the disk gets me "Current Read-only state: Yes" and the rest are "no" Would I be correct in assuming this is some kind of fail safe mode for the controller?

Attempting to repartition it on a linux live disk allowed me to get it working for a few minutes, but when I copied a Windows disk to it (just to test it, I was ecstatic) it got to about 500mb and then the copy speed just completely fell off to zero, and now I'm back to square one. EDIT: By this I mean, upon removing and reinserting the drive, it returned to the RAW, unformatted, state.

So...What's going on with this stupid thing?

Thanks guys!

If your data is important, seek the assistance with a pro who has the necessary flash recovery tools.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Where did you get the stick from (ebay?)

How much did you pay for it?

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I bought it from Amazon a while back, and I paid 45? Something like that.

The symptoms of the device are consistent with it being a fake.

I.e. A 512mb device bodged up to appear like a 16gb device.

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PC Image Data Recovery
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I'm not really sure how you're getting that from what I posted. The drive worked for a number of months, though I never wrote to the entire thing, it definitely could hold what I attempted to put on it.

I've probably had up to 8GB on this drive before, and the last time I tried, it got to about 1.5.

Fake flash drives are very common nowadays. Hence, pcimage was just trying to rule out the obvious.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I got that from what you said, not from what you didn't say.

You said that it only stored up to about 500mb then failed, so it was a reasonable guess that it could have been a fake. (E.g. 512mb device, like I said)

There was no mention that you'd save up to 8gb on it before, so I could only work with the information given as my crystal ball is not working right now!

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Grab h2testw from here
http://www.heise.de/download/h2testw.html
and run a check on your device.

It will most probably come up with plenty of errors, indicating a faulty controller IMHO.

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SandForce SSD Recovery
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Thanks. It looks like it has gone fully read only now, so I'll have to give up on ever using it again (already had, honestly). But given that, I can't scan it with this tool, because I can't give it a partition and Windows won't give it a drive letter.

So, according to that, we're assuming the controller is faulty? Was I correct is assuming that the read-only state is a fail safe to give you a chance of getting your data instead of just writing garbage over it?

Not necessarily, if windows tries to write a file to a device, and it fails it can assume it is read only. I have not seen any failsafe mechanisms built into controllers, Data recovery is not something any controller manufacturers or NAND manufacturers build into their devices.

looks like structure corruption, try some free software, google SD recovery software

Controller defect. Happens a lot.
SD wont help. Moreover data is not. Important.

Dobre

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i have one kingston datatraveler G2 16GB that bought in February 2009 that i plug and unplug at least one time everyday... normaly 3 plugs everyday because of the two computers that i have... and the Media player i have to transfer some mkv movies 4gb+

this flash disk has been running like a champ... i tried to buy another one because of the good experience with the first one in the endings of 2010... the newer pen drive had worse velocities even in the first write of his live... 8MB/s ( second write to test consistency would only do 6 MB/s) write versus the 14MB/s write of the oldie....

i think that not only bad luck... its the quality of the flash memory

It's just cost-cutting. That's all. As long as consumers don't complain, it will continue. I've got a cheap-o Centon disk and it barely pushed 5 MB/s on h2testw.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

thanks for your opinion

yeah thats mine too... thats to much cost cuts... people should know before they buy from some vendors

My older sandisk keydrive ran right up to the limit of usb 2.0. It was also more expensive.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.