Things Kids Shouldn't Do at Home

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

I have killed an 8 GB thumb drive while doing an experiment.

	I had 2 8 GB PNY drives.  One has a FAT 32 file system
and the other had no partitions on it as I had deleted the ones
that were there.

	The good drive had it's UUID tagged to mount on a
directory I called /flash.  The fstab entry is

UUID="3453-A839" /flash vfat rw,user,noauto  0       0
#UUID="5A0D-76AA" /flash vfat rw,user,noauto  0       0

	I decided to make a full copy of the good drive to an
identical PNY 8 GB drive which was the one with all the
partitions deleted.

	The good drive was /dev/sde and the soon to be murdered
drive was /dev/sdd so my copy command was:

dd if=/dev/sde of=/dev/sdd

	It worked and I now had two drives with the same UUID.

	I mounted the doomed drive as /flash and did a rm -r
/flash/* so now I had an empty drive whose UUID is the same as
the good drive.

	Out of curiosity, I wondered what might happen if I had
two thumb drives containing the same UUID.

	After plugging both in to a usb extender, the good drive
is still good.  That's the one whose files I did not delete.

	The drive I killed now does not register anything at all.
It's as if nothing had been plugged in to any USB port.  I
plugged it in to another debian system that didn't witness any of
what I had just done and absolutely nothing happened there
either.

	There is no data emergency here, but what on Earth did I
do to the empty drive to make it not even show an error in
syslog?

	I am sure that having two devices with the same UUID is
not good, but I expected some sort of error message, not a total
destruction of one of the two drives.

	The now dead drive was behaving normally until I plugged
them both in at once.

	I was going to do a mount /flash and see what the system
did but it appears that just having both drives plugged in was
sufficient to draw some blood, so to speak, somewhere.

	The good drive contains some ebooks and I was planning
to put different ebooks on the dead drive but that is not going
to happen unless I can make the dead drive show up again.

	Are there any open-source rescue programs in Linux that
one can run to mess with the on-board controller of the thumb
drive?  This obviously killed the target drive since it was
working right up to when it stopped working.

	Thanks.

Martin McCormick
WB5AGZ