Re: Kingston Thumb Drive Comatose.

["Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net>]

Fungi4All <fungilife@protonmail.com> writes:
> Wild guess would be to use gparted and delete all partitions then
> use dd if=/dev/zero 128000x1024 or more and see what the firmware would 
> do.
> I think it would reset itself once everything is deleted from it and 
> refilled with 0
> blocks to the max. I don't think you can digitally hurt these things till 
> they
> mechanically fail and can't write anymore. They will not delete data on 
> their
> own unless instructed specifically to do so.

	This issue is deeper as the controller in the thumb drive
no longer knows where the media resides.

$sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: No medium found

that is exactly what you also get if you use dd to either write
to /dev/sdc or read from it. Other people using MSWindows state
that the drive shows up as empty and they are prompted to insert
a disk (neat trick.) so different operating systems complain in
slightly different ways, but the upshot is that the on-board
controller has no idea any longer where data are stored hince the
"no medium found" condition.

	With all the tinkering that goes on in Linux, I am
surprised nobody has come up with a set of utilities as I bet
many of these thumb drives have similar microcode or similar
structures for allowing the thumb drive to reset it's controller.

	Since eprom has a finite number of write cycles, the
controllers cleverly shift write jobs around so data are written
to different memory cells when possible.

	I expect the best I can hope for is to reset it to
defaults so the drive will appear empty but can then be
repartitioned and used again.

Martin McCormick