Dead USB Flashes

Probably due to lack of use, I have accumulated a number of little used USB flash drives (all good makes) which are showing as "BAD Disk" in Mini Tool Partition Wizard.
I have tried the usual Googling and all the recommended fixes and utilities with no success. Very annoying to think that these drives have done so little work, but my fault for not using them more.

Has anyone had success with this sort of problem using a utility I might have missed.

Thanks for any help.

 

Take a look at InitDisk.

 

Ran as Admin. No Luck but thx anyway.

 

consider those as dead meat and make them recyclable.

 

Agree, but such a waste.

 

Wait a minute, so if you don't use those USB sticks they can start to malfunction? And what about SSD drives?

 

yeah i know about. i dont know why it happened, but it happened.
thus i buy such hardware which is reliable and not cheap.
and i have backups. currently 64gb kingston was cheap, but is only use it for ventoy and ISO files.

 

They don't go bad due to lack of use, but the data stored on them deteriorates with time. You need to plug them in from time to time to ensure data integrity. Thats valid for SSDs as well.

The reasons for going bad could be exceeding max write cycles, or a hardware fault due to poor manufacturing, or plugging them into a bad usb port that destroyed the chips by supplying too much current etc.

 

Have you tried Hard Disk Sentinel? A few years ago I had an issue with one of my hard drives and only Hard Disk Sentinel was able to test and fix that said drive. It may be able to do the same for your flash drives, provided that it not a hardware fault on the flash drives themselves.

 

This is probably all due to hardware failure as opposed to bad data. Interesting that I only use Kingston drives, and they are all less than 2 years old.

Tried Hard Disk Sentinel as the first attempt with no luck. Thanks anyway.

 

OK thanks, because otherwise I would be in big trouble. I sometimes don't use my external SSD's and USB sticks for months. And yes I know, I should make back ups more often, so this isn't a good thing.

 

You must have gotten a bad batch, or one of your devices has a bad usb port that is destroying these drives.

I have a bunch of Kingston datatraveler DTSE9 flash drives, extensively used for about six years. One of them has been hanging on a key-chain with my car keys for the last five years, and they all are going strong.

My oldest flash drive is Sandisk cruzer titanium from 2007, and it is going strong as well.

 

I have a 32gb Sandisk Ultra USB flash that has become write protected. It looks like the USB firmware did this to keep further data from being corrupted so you can back it up somewhere else. I have not found a way to undo this. It happened while doing an AS SSD Benchmark on it to see the R/W speed. It's really sad to see how many large speed differences there are between the exact same usb models. So what are considered quality flash drives in this day and age?

If anyone knows how to reset the firmware or how to undo the write protect, I'm all ears. All the standard suggestions like chkdsk, diskpart, a lot of third party tools like HDsentinel, HDTune Pro didn't work either.

 

Those are all solutions when not enabled by the controller chip. Unfortunately Sandisk doesn't offer any of their USB firmware to the public to reset the flash.