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I have a 16GB Toshiba USB flash drive that stopped functioning correctly after an interrupted file transfer (took it out while it was transferring files on a Windows machine).

Windows recognizes the drive, but only after I wait a minute for it to load it up. Plugging it into my MacBook Pro, it is also recognized, and I see the files on it. However, I cannot move/delete any of the files.

I don’t care about the files on it, and tried to do a DiskUtility reformat on my Mac.

This is the error I get:

Error: -69760: Unable to write to the last block of the device

Any ideas? Running the command:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=16k

as I’ve seen on some threads returns this:

dd: /dev/rdisk2: Device not configured
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 16.732716 secs (0 bytes/sec)

The drive is currently formatted in NTFS.

EDIT: Worth mentioning that if I right click the drive on 'My Computer' in Windows, and press 'format', nothing pops up... perhaps I have to wait a long time, currently trying this.

EDIT: Turns out that Windows sees the drives as having 0 bytes on it, and a capacity of 0 bytes, and the drive is 'unreachable'.

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  • Is /dev/rdisk2 the same device name used when you can get the Mac to read this flash drive?
    – sawdust
    Nov 26, 2015 at 1:37
  • Throw it away. They're not worth fighting once they start to fail. Sounds like you've triggered the firmware write lock.
    – Tetsujin
    Nov 27, 2015 at 9:30
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    Wait, how do you bypass the firmware write lock? I literally got this drive less than a week ago, tried copying a Ubuntu live CD to it using DD, it was taking forever so I changed /dev/disk2 to /dev/rdisk2 and it completed. Now after unplugging it, it doesn't show up in any of my devices. diskutil list doesn't show it at all. I'm on OS X in case that's not obvious.
    – MarcusJ
    Jan 29, 2016 at 7:35

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