Recover USB flashdrive

655321 · 2012-09-11 00:02:02

Hi guys, I was trying to format my USB flashdrive but something went wrong, now the drive's LED keeps on blinking and it won't show up in my desktop, and trying a manual mount says:

mount: no medium found on /dev/sdb

BUT, lsusb does show the drive, so its not dead! how can I restore this?

Here is the output of lsusb (relevant line only):

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 1b1c:1a01 Corsair

I really, really want to fix this drive, its 36GB and USB 3.0 , it would be terrible to trash it!

Any help greatly appreciated!!

alexanderthegre · 2012-09-11 00:07:27

If you sucessfully formatted (created partitions on) it, it should be /dev/sdb1, not /dev/sdb.

lspci · 2012-09-11 00:22:37

655321 wrote:

Hi guys, I was trying to format my USB flashdrive but something went wrong, now the drive's LED keeps on blinking and it won't show up in my desktop, and trying a manual mount says:
mount: no medium found on /dev/sdb
BUT, lsusb does show the drive, so its not dead! how can I restore this?
Here is the output of lsusb (relevant line only):
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 1b1c:1a01 Corsair
I really, really want to fix this drive, its 36GB and USB 3.0 , it would be terrible to trash it!
Any help greatly appreciated!!

Hey, I didn't even know that lsusb was even a command! Anyway, enough of my 'ooh, shiny' moment. Uhh... try what alexanderthegre said, or if you already have and it fixed your problem please say so.

hadrons123 · 2012-09-11 02:27:02

http://lifehacker.com/5237503/five-best … very-tools

655321 · 2012-09-11 21:45:05

@alexanderthegre thats the thing, I created the partitions but something failed, and now Linux recognizes the drive but won't show anywhere, only place I see it is in lsusb.

@lspci Yes, its very handy to see how the kernel recognizes your USB devices you can use it together with the watch command like this:

watch lsusb

that way you have the command refresh every 2 seconds, so you can check the changes in real time while you connect/disconnect hardware

@hadrons, I tried using testdisk, but the USB key won't show up in the list!

Any other tips I can try?

Gusar · 2012-09-11 21:53:25

Do you actually want to recover data that was on the stick? Considering you were formatting the thing, it doesn't appear so. Which means you can use the brute-force method - completely zero out the thing, then format it and create a partition:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=8M
fdisk /dev/sdb  # enter appropriate commands to create partition
mkfs.vfat -n label_here /dev/sdb1

Considering it's a 32GB thing, the dd command can take quite a while. And be extra careful with it, you don't want to be zeroing out your actual system

Last edited by Gusar (2012-09-11 21:55:10)

android · 2012-09-12 00:19:48

I actually had a similiar experience lately, when copying the latest install media to a usb stick.

Something went wrong, and when I tried to recover, I got errors when trying to fdisk:

[root@worker500 johnea]# fdisk /dev/sdb
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.21.1).

Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.

fdisk: unable to open /dev/sdb: No medium found

The block device shows in dmesg, and lsusb:

[1945260.792262] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 55 using ehci_hcd
[1945260.916877] scsi14 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[1945261.919509] scsi 14:0:0:0: Direct-Access     USBest   USB2FlashStorage 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[1945261.921843] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

[root@worker500 johnea]# lsusb
...
Bus 001 Device 055: ID 1307:0163 Transcend Information, Inc. 256MB/512MB/1GB Flash Drive

The dd command suggested gives a similiar error to fdisk:

[root@worker500 johnea]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=8M
dd: opening '/dev/sdb': No medium found

The device seems pretty well bricked.

In my case it's a 1G usb 2.0 stick. So it's not a great loss, but it is a little scary, not knowing how it happened.

I haven't found any solution, just wanted to include the additional data.

WonderWoofy · 2012-09-12 00:31:14

android wrote:

I actually had a similiar experience lately, when copying the latest install media to a usb stick.

I had the same thing happen to my shiny brand new adata usb 3.0 n005 16GB, and it had me greatly concerned.

So I plugged it into a Macbook, and it wanted to initialize it. So I removed it and installed gparted on my machine and it found it right away.

I am not sure why fdisk/gdisk freaked out with it, while parted (albiet the graphical one) found it no problem. I assume that it would have also been found had I used the parted cli as well, but it was already fixed at that point.

Interestingly, I cannot get that particular flash drive to successfully load an installer.

android · 2012-09-12 00:40:06

Thanks for the suggestion WonderWoofy, unfortunately for me gparted gave the same error:

[root@worker500 johnea]# gparted /dev/sdb
======================
libparted : 3.1
======================
Error opening /dev/sdb: No medium found

Whatever i did, I bricked it good 8-(

Hopefully gparted will work for 655321

Last edited by android (2012-09-12 00:56:51)

655321 · 2012-09-13 17:28:47

@Gusar, no, data is not important. And now that I think about it, when the USB drive worked it was called "Corsair Voyager" and now it just called "Corsair" It got corrupted really ugly.

Trying to zero out the drive does not work either, still says, medium not found.....

@android, Gparted was the one who started the problem after an unsuccesfull format, and still I can't see it anywhere, only in lsusb

x33a · 2012-09-13 18:14:34

lspci wrote:

Hey, I didn't even know that lsusb was even a command! Anyway, enough of my 'ooh, shiny' moment. Uhh... try what alexanderthegre said, or if you already have and it fixed your problem please say so.

Says one with the username "lspci"

try ls<tab-completion>, you'll have many ooh, shiny moments.

lspci · 2012-09-13 18:19:41

x33a wrote:

lspci wrote:
Hey, I didn't even know that lsusb was even a command! Anyway, enough of my 'ooh, shiny' moment. Uhh... try what alexanderthegre said, or if you already have and it fixed your problem please say so.
Says one with the username "lspci"
try ls<tab-completion>, you'll have many ooh, shiny moments.

lol, yay!! Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that yet.

android · 2012-09-13 20:27:54

The first suggestion by tropicflite in this reddit post is pretty funny.

Don't know if it will actually help recover the USB stick, but it might make you feel better about it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ … usb_drive/

8-)

655321 · 2012-09-14 01:14:51

LOL!!! Im going to try it and come back with results! mmm but I don't have doritos, lays should do.

multiedit · 2012-09-23 02:24:42

If anybody has a solution to this problem, it'd be really appreciated!
I have the same one: lisusb gives me the following:
Bus 001 Device 012: ID 090c:1000 Silicon Motion, Inc. - Taiwan (formerly Feiya Technology Corp.) 64MB QDI U2 DISK
but i cannot format this usb drive! Neither use it :-(
Is it even possible? Or should i just buy another one ... sigh...

Hugh · 2012-09-23 19:51:06

I too have a broken USB flash memory stick. It's a bit of a mystery.

- Linux (Fedora 17, not Arch) sees the USB interface but not the drive itself

- "sdparm -a /dev/sdi" hangs for a long time and then prints out a table of counters, all zero, except for one that is 128. I think that that means that it has tried 128 times to read and failed. Superstitiously, I wonder if sdparm broke the drive so I don't wish to try again to get the exact output.

- sometimes the Win7 disk manager sees the drive medium, sometimes not (I haven't characterized this more accurately). I once had it do a reformat (non-fast) to fix the drive (at the recommendation of the manufacturer's tech support). That seemed to work for a short while.

- my current best guess is that there is some intermittent problem with the stick's circuitry. So I'm going to try to get it replaced under warranty.

tight · 2014-12-01 22:20:18

Gusar wrote:

Which means you can use the brute-force method - completely zero out the thing, then format it and create a partition:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

Thanks, it worked for me (same problem). I used gparted to create a new partition table and a new partition.
(dd took ~15/20 minutes for a 16 GB flash drive)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-09-11 00:02:02

Recover USB flashdrive

#2 2012-09-11 00:07:27

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#3 2012-09-11 00:22:37

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#4 2012-09-11 02:27:02

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#5 2012-09-11 21:45:05

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#6 2012-09-11 21:53:25

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#7 2012-09-12 00:19:48

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#8 2012-09-12 00:31:14

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#9 2012-09-12 00:40:06

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#10 2012-09-13 17:28:47

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#11 2012-09-13 18:14:34

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#12 2012-09-13 18:19:41

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#13 2012-09-13 20:27:54

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#14 2012-09-14 01:14:51

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#15 2012-09-23 02:24:42

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#16 2012-09-23 19:51:06

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

#17 2014-12-01 22:20:18

Re: Recover USB flashdrive

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