Pen drive not detected ubuntu
 

I am using a 4 Gb pen drive on my system and ubuntu is not detecting it. I believe the culprit here is windows which corrupted it when i lended the pen drive to a friend and he may have not safely remove it. Anyway i tried :

but ubuntu fails to show my pendrive their too.

Here is the output for I think it may help, i don't know what's the reason. please help

Thanks

Gaurav

Your pendrive is "broken", for whatever reason.

Repartition and reformat it, and all should be well - You can reuse it.

Next time choose "Remove device" (Windows) or "Safely Remove" (linux) before it is unplugged

I have to agree, it certainly sounds like its broken. Do you have access to a Windows PC at all? You could try an fsck.vfat on the drive but you might not get anywhere with that. If that doesn't work try a scandisk or chkdsk from Windows if you can.

Hope your drive still works.

I tried it on a windows pc but it still does not detects it.
How can i reformat it??

Please Help

Thanks

Gaurav

Sounds like its damaged beyond repair. If it doesn't show up in Windows Device Manager and nothing in Linux either.

Failing that, check the Windows Event Viewer for errors, I'd expect to see disk errors.

I had a USB fail on me, light just pulsated but nothing happened, to make sure no'one could take any data off it I microwaved it for 30 seconds. :)

It seems that the only way is it's replacement. Anyway i will do that

Thanks

what about fdisk /dev/sg0

delete every partition

create a linux partition

mkfs /dev/sd0

mount /dev/sd0 /mnt

if it does not work, try to boot from a puppy live-CD, see if you can format it from there

otherwise, not sure about the microwave, but for sure a barbecue or a hammer will do

/dev/sg0 just hangs
 

fdisk /dev/sg0 just don't shows any output after inserting my so called pen drive.

What to do?

try (from root):
modprobe uhci_hcd

Ok, now I would check inserting the drive with and without protection, if it has one, and after setting the protection, try with the long list of tools and forensic tools, one by one, maybe you get lucky:

dd
gpart
rdd
foremost
sleuthkit/autopsy
ddrescue
lde
magicrescue
pcopy
recover
gddrescue

... there are for sure more, google it ...

If none of those works, I would try to see it with some live-CD, try some like PLACK, Knoppix STD and Helix. I found several times that something unreadable on two or more systems, would become readable on another one, at least enough to get an "image" of it with dd and/or to reformat it. It happened to me on a DVD burned on fedora, that became visible once after rebooting about ten times, so I had a chance to copy out of there the things I needed, before trashing it.

Also, try some other architectures, maybe school or friends may have a sparc or a PPC mac, to see at least if you can format it. Recently I had a problem with a disk, that failed to be visible on windows, and neither OSX nor linux x86 could see it. Solaris sparc could see it with pages of geometry errors, so I formatted it there, and now is running ok on the sparc (it still complains about the geometry error but it works).

After you try enough of live CD's and systems, you can either pay a bunch of money to a forensic laboratory, if it is worth it, or safely destroy with a heavy hammer or a hot barbecue or gas torch.

wish you luck ...

:)

dude, this is the debian forum. If you have ubuntu questions go to Ubuntu Forums or some place like that.

This is hardly a specific Ubuntu question though so I think its perfectly fine here.