Score:3

recovery of USB drive after accidental formats of its entire block

de flag

Yes, I was dumb enough to not check that I formatted the whole block as fat32, then NTFS and multiple attempts to rejuvenate it using dd-ing a blank disk image file. On inspection of size using blockdev --getsize64, it reports the correct number of bytes but it fails to get completely filled up from /dev/zero. (honestly don't know why did I do that in the first place).

Edit: Ubuntu LTS (jammy) is the OS used (no other is installed) for the recovery attempts.

The affected hardware in question is a 16GB Toshiba TransMemory drive

Edit 2: MBR table could be corrupted and I have no idea how to fix that

oldfred avatar
cn flag
have you used this drive to know it is valid? Both SSD & flash drives may be a scam. https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2489334 & https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/walmart-lists-a-30tb-portable-ssd-for-39-it-is-naturally-a-scam/
aq flag
@oldfred its only 16GB, the faked size USB drives are TBs.
sudodus avatar
jp flag
If you 'only' want to create a new partition table and file system, you can use **gparted** (install it into your Ubuntu Jammy system, then use it). - If still problems, you should test that the hardware of the USB drive is good (not corrupted). You can do that by trying to 'wipe the whole drive' (fill it with zeros), which can be done easily with [mkusb](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb).
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