no media detected on a usb flash drive

Question

I have a Kingston DT MicroDuo 3.0 and it was working fine till it didn't mount on Windows, Mac nor Ubuntu

It appears in the disk utility as /dev/sdd and in the volumes area it shows no media detected

I tried sudo fdisk dev/sdd/ but got

fdisk: unable to open dev/sdd/: no such file or directory

and then I tried sudo umount dev/sdd/but got the error:

umount:  dev/sdd/: not mounted

It doesn't matter if I need to format the drive, but I need it back into a working condition.

Is that a typo? It should be sudo fdisk /dev/sdd or sudo umount /dev/sdd. — Terrance, Jul 8, 2015 at 5:18
Run "dmesg -T | tail " after you insert the USB disk. Can you see your disk got detected? It will complain if it has some error with the disk. If it detects, you can try " gparted " command to format the disk and see if that helps. — Chandrasekar, Jul 8, 2015 at 9:59

Fabby · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-17 08:27:05Z

2

These are all the symptoms of a broken USB stick. Please replace it.

To be absolutely sure that it is indeed broken, install the smartmontools package:

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

then run:

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdd

and depending on the error message you'll know for sure that it's broken.

Sorry to be the harbinger of bad news

answered Jul 8, 2015 at 11:38

Fabby

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– Fabby
Jul 8, 2015 at 12:41
This works with an USB stick? … Checking
– A.B.
Jul 8, 2015 at 13:48
1

the device isn't with me atm, as soon as am able to try, i'll post the answer, sry.
– Karim Bomba AbouDoh
Jul 8, 2015 at 16:36
2

I would like to confirm that this program and command does in fact verify that a USB Stick is fried. Just tested it on one and sure enough. Unknown bridge.
– B-Dawg
Feb 17, 2017 at 5:49
1

@BradynClaycomb: edited. Worthy of an upvote now? :-)
– Fabby
Feb 17, 2017 at 8:27

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