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My pen drive for some reason has turned read-only and I can't get it back to it's previous state. I have read the following answers but they didn't work :

When I try running sudo mount -o remount,rw '/media/USB DISK'', it gives me the following error :

mount: cannot remount /dev/sdb1 read-write, is write-protected

And when I try running sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o uid=$(id -u) '/dev/sdb1' /mnt/ it gives me

Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened. The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command.

Any help how to fix this ?

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  • The problem might be fixed, if you change the permissions, like you are trying to do. It is also a good idea to reboot the computer, try another USB port, try another computer, try another operating system (for example Windows). If none of these methods help, it is possible that the pendrive is failing - the first stage 'gridlocked', and the next stage is completely dead. So please backup all important files from the pendrive to another drive before you continue. And at this stage you can try to repair the file system, and finally try to create a new partition table and file system.
    – sudodus
    Feb 6, 2017 at 8:27
  • Yep, sometimes pendrives just go bad - in my experience, when it goes read-only like this, it's may not be fixable. Backup your data, and then you could try to create a new partition table and partition, for example with GParted. Feb 6, 2017 at 8:42
  • In the last 10 years I have not seen a method to fix bricked, read only pendrives that works. Most pendrives have a pretty long warranty and a read only pendrive is better that a totally dead one. Feb 7, 2017 at 4:25

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