Permanent home onto Sandisk USB flash drive ruined drive

[mjman]

I was running knoppix v.3.7 within windows with VMware. With kernel 2.4. I wanted to set up a permanent home on my usb flash drive so i used the wizard to format the drive with a linux file system, (ext-3 or something?) and put the right files onto the disk. I then tried to restart the virtual machine, and use the flash drive as a permanent home using the cheatcode: home=scan. If i boot the virtual machine with the memory key inserted, the bootup stalls on "Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab...
If i insert the drive after booting up, knoppix does not recognize the presence of the drive.

Now, in windows XP, if i insert the drive, it takes about 30 seconds to recognize it. If i try to access the drive from my computer it gives the error: "Drive is not formatted, format now?" after about 2 minutes of stalling. If i click Format, then it says, "Drive cannot be formatted".
If i try to format the drive from the command prompt, i get the error: "Error in IOCTL call"

Does anyone know whats going on?? I don't want to lose my flash drive.

p.s. its a Sandisk Cruzer mini 256 mb drive.

[bandoba]

Most probably your flash drive is still OK. Try the HP USB disk format utility here http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html. I believe it works with all USB drives. It should format your drive so that Windows can understand it again.

[mjman]

Using the HP USB drive format utility, I get this error:
"Device Media is Write-protected"

[Luke Riches]

it looks like your Stick is "write-protected".

try looking for a tiny switch, there you can set the write protection for your USB stick.

[mjman]

the USB drive doesn't have any external write-protect switch.

[Luke Riches]

when its attached to the USB port and its in the system, then go to the properties of the drive via Windows Explorer-->RightClick on the drive--->Properties

and take a look if this option is available in the settings for the drive there...

[mjman]

nope, no option there.

[mjman]

YAY!!! i fixed it!

I used Killdisk.exe to completley erase the disk, and then used the HP format utility to format it.

[OErjan]

i was just going to sugest
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mount/point/of/disk bs=512 count=9999999999999
that comand writes 0's all over the disk (about what the killdisk thing does).
for a hard drive you could use /dev/urandom instead and do it 2 times, that should wipe the disk fairly well (some data might still be recoverable but filesystem is gone). 30 times should be near 99.9% certain to make it free from information. would take a looooooooong time though, atleast on any decently sized drive (40G and up, (40 000 000 000 writes to the disk*30)/transferspeed...).
why not do that on a flashdisk? wel they do actually wear out after 10 000-100 000 read/write operations. not good as a filesystem uses one place to store the locations of the files... and that is written to every time something is read/written...

[Matir]

Flash drives do indeed wear out, but only from being re-flashed. The write count is what kills them, and it varies by type, make, and quality, but is generally 10,000-100,000 writes. A *KEY* point when mounting a flash drive under linux is to use the "noatime" option to switch off writing access times. If you do not do this, then you will have a write on every access. Not only will this eat up your drive, but it can make it slower, especially when copying a lot of data.