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

[Chris Robinson]

 Actually, I've never had a problem with a thumb drive that couldn't be fixed.
There IS a problem with the partition table placed there at the factory format on some thumb drives.  From memory, it was a bug with the way the original DOS programs did partition table formats.  It wasn't a problem until FAT32, but for some reason Linux systems can have problems with drives that previously worked fine.  It usually pops up after you format the partition.

What I'd recommend is to use DD to write zeros to the first couple of KB.  This will overwrite the partition table.  You'll then need to recreate a FAT32 partition and format it.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4K

Change sdX to the device name for the unmounted thumb drive.  Do NOT get this wrong because any device written to will be very difficult to recover if you haven't previously made a copy.The usual problem I came across was that the drive could not be accessed at all, even to partition or format until the partition table was erased.  I've heard of similar problems to David's as well.
If you don't want to mess around with DD (huge potential for disaster if you write nulls to the wrong drive) then you could try using the disks program, delete the partition table (make sure that gets written, maybe exit the program to commit the write) and then recreate a new compliant FAT32 partition.  I've heard of that working, but of course is not possible in cases where the device can't be accessed or written to.

I'll be interested to know this solves the problem, because it would mean that thumb drive manufacturers are still using a very, very, old spec. for partition tables.  I pretty routinely wipe any new thumb drive and create my own partition, and like I said I've never had a problem with any thumb drive ever.  Some of them are tiny ones that must be a couple of decades old that still get used to transfer a few files to another computer somewhere.
Chris





    On Sunday, 30 June 2024 at 11:29:20 pm AEST, Chris Guiver <guiverc at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 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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