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I have a usb stick that suddenly started mounting read-only. I was going try and reformat it (e.g. with gparted) but wouldn't let me as it's mounted read only. Also (optimistically) tried zero-ing it (i.e. dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdb - again same problem).

Tried some of the regular fixes to mounting usb problems ... e.g:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /media/mountpoint
mount: cannot remount /dev/sdb1 read-write, is write-protected

Tried sudo dosfsck -a /dev/sdb1 - (it was a fat32 formatted USB stick), with similar effect. Also ran badblocks, which found 25 bad blocks.

Any clues on what's going on? And what else I can try?

djmac
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1 Answers1

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With the price of USB flash drives what it is, compared with the value of whatever you're likely to store on it, the best thing I can suggest for a flash drive with bad blocks is to toss it in the trash (erase with a hammer first, if you're concerned about data that might be recoverable from the drive) and buy a new one.

Zeiss Ikon
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