[Nottingham] Dead USB Memory stick?

[Martin]

Camilo Mesias wrote:
> 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.

I was worried that would be the case.

It's branded as a "SUPER*TALENT", the internals report SMI Corporation
idVendor=090c, idProduct=1000 Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 USB DISK

> 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.

Very good ideas except that the device appears to be locked as
"read-only". Any write attempt (to the first sectors) causes it to lock out.

:-(

Very annoying if it's just one stuck bit in one block out of the 8GBytes!

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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