[Nottingham] Dead USB Memory stick?

[Camilo Mesias]

Hi,

You probably can't get at the low level flash - there may be some
utilities for debugging or diagnosing faults but they're not likely to
be generally available.

Have you tried block device level utilities like badblocks and e2fsck
-c ? They might be helpful depending on how the USB implements its
storage, many devices have a small number of spare blocks and when a
block can't be used any more they reassign a spare for the damaged
block. A cheaper device would have fewer spares and might fail to
write as a result. If the failure is predictable then marking it as a
bad block at a higher layer (ie Linux) would be a good thing to do.

-Cam