Cannot repair a corrupted usb flash drive

Question

I have an 8GB USB 2.0 flash drive (no-name), on which I tried a few days ago to copy a film of about 6GB. The flash drive had NTFS file system so I thought there will be no problems. But at some point an error had occurred that I didn't noticed and after some time I removed the flash drive without seeing the error. Now the flash drive is unusable. In Windows I get a Drive is write protected error, so I tried with Ubuntu.

I have run GParted as superuser, with the partition not mounted. This is how GParted recognizes the drive:

And in the Information tab it is said

Unable to detect file system! Possible reasons are
 - The file system is damaged
 - The file system is unknown to GParted
 - There is no file system available (un-formatted)
 - The device entry /dev/sdd1 is missing

Ultimately, when I try to format (simply format, or delete partition then make a new partition), I get the following errors:

Input/output error during write on /dev/sdd
Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdd: Input/output error

I tried using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=512 count=1 to clear all data, then mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdd1 to format to FAT32, but this has no effect. Also, I searched for bad sectors with badblocks -sv -b 512 /dev/sdd, and it returned 0 bad blocks.

Any ideas of how can I make this flash drive usable?

Update: I have managed to wipe the data (fill with zero) using Minitool Partition Wizard under windows, but now under Windows/Ubuntu the drive is recognized as "read-only"... can't do anything to it...

Solution

If writing with dd to the disk fails then it's quite possible your USB is bricked and will not function right again.

USB drives do wear out - whether it be an external USB hard drive with spinning platters or a standard flash drive. Input/Output error indicates a problem with data write/read which can indicate broken hardware.

Comments

[karel]

GParted didn't work, so try this answer. It worked for me after I used the dd command to overwrite an 8GB USB flash drive.

[Dumi01]

@karel thanks, but the same errors appear, the drive is in the same state ...

[Dumi01]

thats why I would like to repair it, I didn't bought it, I received it as part of a prize at a contest

[Parto]

Hey @Dumi01 did you solve this issue? I'm facing the same thing in my 16GB flash drive...

[Dumi01]

I don't have anything on it that I need to recover, I was looking for a way to make the usb drive work again, I cannot format it...