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I have a 256 GB pen drive, bought in a store from a legitimate and well-known dealer.

Since yesterday, the drive doesn't get recognized anymore:

  • Gparted displays Input/output error during read on /dev/sdc
  • btrfs check /dev/sdc shows No valid Btrfs found on /dev/sdc Error: cannot open file system

  • dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M works for a while. But then, ctrl-c doesn't work. Upon pulling the pen drive, it finally stops and always shows something around 4 GB, for example 4565499904 bytes (4.6 GB, 4.3 GiB) copied, 18351.3 s, 249 kB/s - no matter how long I let dd run.

  • fdisk /dev/sdc fails with fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: Input/output error

  • badblocks -w /dev/sdc runs and runs and runs and runs... but when I stopped it (after a block count of about two billion) it said it has only written to about 1.7 billion blocks

Is there anything else I can try? For example, letting badblocks -w run until it stops on its own?

user258532
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    It looks like the hardware or internal electronics of the USB pendrive is damaged (beyond repair with the tools available to regular users like you and me). But you can try to analyze the problems according to this link, and if you are lucky, you may get it working again. – sudodus Nov 10 '19 at 09:58
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    Thank you! I tried but didn't succeed. :-/ At least this USB drive was a backup anyway, and I have several of them. So, no data loss at all. – user258532 Nov 14 '19 at 10:30
  • Sorry, that you could not revive your USB pendrive. Anyway, thanks for sharing how this issue was resolved. – sudodus Nov 14 '19 at 12:26

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