Is this USB flash drive dead?
 

Hi, I have a USB flash drive that has been working fine, but all of a sudden it has stopped working. The device just shows as /dev/sda without the partition sda1.

fdisk says -
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x92045b41.
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

cfdisk says -
Unknown partition table type
Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N] ?

If I wipe everything and create a new partition, it looks OK until I exit (c)fdisk; sda1 still does not show and re-entering (c)fdisk shows the same errors (changes are lost).

Any ideas? Thanks.

Try it under another distro or knoppix. If the same message appears, it's toast.

Same problem under a different distro.

I tried mknod /dev/sda1 b 3 1 and I can manually mount it, but I have to do this manually on every computer. Should sda1 not be 8 1? Only 3 1 works. Very weird.

After you manually mount it, it works?

Then the flash drive is OK, but you need a udev rule that handles that particular drive. I had the same problem with a PNY drive; I made a udev rule for it.

Yes it works then.

I'm planning on using this as a bootable drive on multiple computers but it's not detected; very annoying.