USB sticks used with ‘Startup Disk Creator’ not reusable?

[David]

Hi folks

In the past I had 20.04 LTS installed on an old laptop and when 22.04 LTS became available I used the application in Ubuntu called ‘Startup Disk Creator’ to write the new ISO image to a USB stick in order to do a clean install of 22.04 LTS. That process worked fine, the USB stick did the job fine.

Earlier this year the laptop stopped working and I had it repaired professionally, new SSD instead of the hard drive. They put Windows onto it so that they could check things. I don’t have another Ubuntu machine on which to use ‘Startup Disk Creator’ again, so I’ll be looking for a Windows option for creating a USB for installing from.

It was then that I examined the USB stick for the first time since I had used ‘Startup Disk Creator’ a couple of years back or so for the install of 22.04 LTS. I understood that ‘Startup Disk Creator’ had formatted the USB stick for its purposes, and figured that in Windows I could reformat it with FAT32 or exFAT in order to use the stick again for another purpose. Windows couldn’t format it, saying that the stick is ‘write-protected’. The IT Support staff at my workplace have not been able to remove the write-protection and get the stick usable again with any of their tools. They used some sort of partition manager tool, and tried via a Mac laptop too.
It feels a bit like how people described non-reusable CDs and DVDs as beer-coasters in the past.

Is this outcome something that ‘Startup Disk Creator’ is known for, or have I just had bad luck? 

Should a USB stick that was used with ‘Startup Disk Creator’ be able to be reformatted for everyday read/write work again?

Cheers
David