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

[Chris Guiver]

G'day David

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

Yes, however USB thumb-drives are really just cheap media; built to a low
price without any error checking, and they fail.  I suspect your
thumb-drive has failed; even if not the whole device, enough of it that the
contents can no longer be changed.

There are some USB drives which can be triggered to be RO (Read Only), but
they are/were rare (more expensive) and usually have a somewhat disguised
button/slide that prevents writing if the slider is in the protect mode.
Your USB 'stick' could be one of these, but only someone seeing the device
will be able to tell you (and they weren't common, so aren't often
recognized)

The write of an ISO to a thumb-drive does cause the image itself to be
written as READ ONLY, but that is only to prevent corruption, and that RO
cannot prevent a reformat; as its purpose is only to protect the image from
CHANGE, nor erasure.

Again, I think your USB flash/thumb-drive is just faulty... I'm throwing
out 2-5 per year because they no longer can be trusted (I always DIFF or
confirm a write to thumb-drive is perfect before I trust it, and those
thumb-drives are failing my checks)  It's a cheap consumable media, and
every write to it can destroy it.

Chris g.


On Sun, Jun 30, 2024 at 11:01 PM David <agora at justemail.net> wrote:

> 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
>
> --
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> ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
>
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