Is a USB flash drive like this beyond repair? (SOLVED)

[Antipodal]

Before botching up another one I would like to know if I can rescue these.
Sorry for my illiteracy and clumsiness
Help will be appreciated
Thanks for your time.

[Burn_IT]

Not necessarily.
That just looks as though it needs partitioning, given a label, and formatting.

It may insist you cannot partition it, in which case just format it as a superfloppy.

[Burn_IT]

duplicate.

[Antipodal]

Thank you very much.!
Any recommended readings on the subject? Specially about superfloppys
Thank you for your time

PS: Sorry . i overlooked your last message but I don't understand what you mean with that (duplicate) word.

PS: Do you mean I should do the same thing to both flash drives?

[Burn_IT]

It means that my front door bell rang while I was composing my reply and I didn't know whether the "submit" worked so I submitted it again and found I had, so I edited the second one since I was not allowed to delete it.

Superfloppies are things like Zip drives and such that have the whole drive as one "partition" but without partition tables. It is often possible to logically convert such drives to look like a USB Hard Drive, but not always.

I only saw the first one.

[Antipodal]

It means that my front door bell rang while I was composing my reply and I didn't know whether the "submit" worked so I submitted it again and found I had, so I edited the second one since I was not allowed to delete it.

Thanks

[RetroTechGuy]

If nothing else works, plug it in and go to the command line and use (make absolutely sure that you know where it is):

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fdisk /dev/sdc

You should be able to examine that there is media there, its size, and confirm that it has no partition table (otherwise it will tell you that there is a partition there), etc. Use "p" to "print" the details (to the screen). Add a partition, "n". At the end, "w" to actually write your selections to the drive. It doesn't do anything until you "w"...

[Antipodal]

Thank you very much RetroTechGuy!
Any recommended or suggested reading for somebody who is eager to learn about managing storing devices?

[Burn_IT]

I have loads of tools for doing things with flash drives.
Unfortunately they all need Windows and because they use low level machine access to the device, I don't think they work under Wine and I haven't looked for the Linux equivalents.

[Antipodal]

Thanks.
I'll wait to see if somebody who knows where to find and manage them, posts here

[RetroTechGuy]

Thank you very much RetroTechGuy!
Any recommended or suggested reading for somebody who is eager to learn about managing storing devices?

One of the things I do with most of my drives is to set reserved space to zero.

On a typical multiuser system, the users can clog things up to the point that the OS and Root can't work...unless they reserve space just for root...

But Puppy is a single user system -- why do I need to reserve 5% of my HDD for me...I mean root...

So you partitioned and formatted your drive, and it reserved 5%...

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tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdc1

There is also an old driver for EXT2 that will allow your WInXP machine read and write your Linux drives. Unfortunately, the standard inode is 256 now. Using "mke2fs", you can control both the reserved space and inode side during format (I don't believe that you can change the inode, once formatted). So you made a partition (either with fdisk or gparted), and want to format or reformat it:

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mke2fs -i 128 -m 0 /dev/sdc1

Will format the partition as ext2, 0 reserved space, and inode 128 (which is compatible with the old WinXP driver, whose name I forget... ).

Managing drives... The basics are:

1) All drives will fail (it's just a matter of time).

2) Data integrity is the only thing that matters (computers can be replaced, the data stored on them cannot -- for example, your precious family photos).

3) Make backup copies of all important data. There are some good tools for essentially cloning the content of drives. Under Puppy, look up "syncbackup" -- a nice GUI that is easy to configure (it will copy and update new files -- and even replicate deletions if you select that -- making a true clone, with the exception of the corrupted mounted save file ). Under WinXP (and maybe Win7) and older, find "Karen's Replicator" -- Win10 interrupts it repeatedly, and it will never finish backing up (Thanks a lot, Win10...you bloated pig).

4) Make backup copies of your working OS installation (this is easy with frugal Puppies -- mount a copy of the OS, and copy the main to a new name -- I usually change the extension from ".2fs" to ".2fx" or ".bak" -- so Puppy doesn't try to grab it). Copying a mounted save file will result in a corrupted save file (however, checking it before mounting will usually correct that -- don't count on it if you can help it).

On systems other than Puppy, get a copy of Clonezilla and back up your OS. Why rebuild a working and tuned system, when you can just restore it.

[Philh]

Which method did you use to install Easy
I think you need at least 4GB usb stick for easy.
Its probably tried to make a gpt partition before crashing.
To get it working again
Using gparted select the usb stick
then go to device along the top menu and select create partition table.
Select Msdos.
Then partition, new and format it to what you want.

[bigpup]

If the above does not work, just using Gparted to make new partition table and partition, format.

Note about SuperFloppy installs:
SuperFloppy installs will put the USB flash drive in a non-normal partition/format condition.
If you wish to no longer use the USB flash drive this way.
To get the USB flash drive back to a normal partition/format condition do the following things.

To do this the USB flash drive can not be in use. Only accessed. Not booted from. Not being used to run Puppy.
In a console type this code and hit enter.
Important
(The code of=/dev/sdb sdb is the flash drive, yours could be sdc, sdd, etc.... adjust to match yours)

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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1

This will remove all partitions, format, and data from USB flash drive.

Use Gparted to get back to normal setup.
1. Make a partition table:
GParted > Device > Create Partition Table > MS-DOS default.
2. Partition and format as you like.

[Antipodal]

Thanks to all of you!
I will take into account all your posts in the context of this article and its links I am also reading.
As you know, my knowledge on IT is very poor and I don't want to make things worse.
I'll take this problem as a good occasion for me to build knowledge on top of it.

[RetroTechGuy]

Incidentally, I (unfortunately) had an opportunity to do a surface scan on one of my hard drives...

I found instructions on doing a surface scan under Linux, but it needed some tweaks to work under Puppy (some capitalization issues)... I found that the following does a thorough non-destructive surface scan (of course, you should copy all the files that will copy, just in case something goes badly). This will often force a drive to identify weak sectors, which the internal hardware will usually reallocate.

With the drive UNMOUNTED, fsck it this way:

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fsck -f -y -v -c -c /dev/sdd1 

[Antipodal]

Dear Puppians:
During these last 77 days a spreadsheet related work has kept me so busy that I haven't had time to do other computer related things I had planned to do.
Fortunately that stage has ended and I have found my time to turn your wise words into facts.
As expected, the problem described in this thread has been solved.
The proof is in the attachment
Thanks to you all!

PS: While I was writing these lines, I was recalling that turning your words into facts, implied, for a non computer savvy like me, quite a number of small steps that, by their complexity seemed similar to the one that was described in here.
That induced me to think that perhaps Puppy Linux Newsletter CEO might be interested in publishing a description of the small steps it takes to fix a flash drive like mine.
Just thinking aloud.
OK. I'm done.

[RetroTechGuy]

As expected, the problem described in this thread has been solved.
The proof is in the attachment
Thanks to you all!

Congrats!

PS: While I was writing these lines, I was recalling that turning your words into facts, implied, for a non computer savvy like me, quite a number of small steps that, by their complexity seemed similar to the one that was described in here.
[...]

Hmmm... Nice. I just picked up something new (i.e. Youtube issues) -- gonna have to give this a try.