So, here's the scenario:
I have a backup of a USB drive on my Ubuntu machine. I also have openssh installed, and I was copying files from the backups over the network using FileZilla on Windows since for some reason Ubuntu was giving I/O errors when copying with rsync. I went away, and when I came back my Windows machine was acting bizzare saying to insert a disk into the drive where the flash drive was stored, so I knew something was wrong. Luckily I have backups of the USB drive, as I mentioned earlier. Two of my USB drives are doing this, one is a PNY 128GB USB 3.0 flash drive, and the other is a Lexar 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive. Neither Windows or Linux will let me format the drives.
If I format the flash drives in linux using the Disks application, I get this error:
Drive A (PNY Flash Drive)
Error creating file system: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sde" mktable msdos' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Warning: Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sde: Remote I/O error Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/sde Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/sde Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/sde Warning: Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sde: Remote I/O error (udisks-error-quark, 0)
Drive B (Lexar Flash Drive)
Error creating file system: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sdd" mktable msdos' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/sdd Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/sdd Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/sdd (udisks-error-quark, 0)
In Linux disk management, drive a (PNY) shows up as 136 GB Unknown while drive b (Lexar) shows up as 64 GB Unknown. When running fdisk -l
the drives don't show up. Both drives were formatted as NTFS with an MBR partition table when this happened. SMART Data is not avalible for either drive, and there is no physical damage to them.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/YOUR_USB_DRIVE bs=4096
is the command to zero out a drive, just replaceYOUR_USB_DRIVE
with the correct name, e.g.sde
. If you chose the wrong name here, the command will overwrite whatever you told it (e.g. your hard disk), so be careful!sudo dd if=/dev/YOUR_USB_DRIVE of=/dev/null bs=4096