The same thing happened to me. Sites like this:
https://linuxiac.com/how-to-create-bootable-usb-drive-using-dd-command/
say to simply use Disk Destroyer to copy the iso and boom. I think I have done it in the past, but now it broke my drive.
I do not think it is bad hardware because it was working great until I used DD to copy an ubuntu iso, and then I couldn't get rid of the iso 9660. Somewhere in this process I did manage to wipe the parition and fs sectors to zeros (checked with xxd | head -32
), but then it came back somehow when I opened gparted and complained that my physical block size is 2048 bytes but linux thinks is 512 b (same as logical block size).
Your question sums up all the processes I have tried over the past few days nicely, I may add a few more obscure hdparm
commands: (extremely dangerous to your contents, but if you've made it this far its probably nearly a brick anyway). After trying to get write access with hdparm -r0
, or the modprobe
unload/reload with quark described in your question:
restore factory settings:
hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing --dco-restore /dev/sdc
hdparm --set-sector-size 2048 /dev/sdc
if your sector sizes also got messed up going through above procedure. Gparted will complain 'physical sector size is x but linux reports it is y' or something to that effect.
I think the next step (if you must not just throw away and get a new drive) is to use vendor specific tools. Have a look at this tree of links:
http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=20865
https://www.usbdev.ru/
https://www.usbdev.ru/articles/detect_controller/
https://www.usbdev.ru/articles/thestart/
https://flashboot.ru/files/file/419/
Brush up on your русский, they are windows-only utilities, probably written by Russians in C++. They have compiled a huge database of thumb drive and chip manufacturers, and it explains how it all works with funny translations. Their intentions seem good, but I might distance sensitive data or machines from your academic test machine you load with random privileged binary blobs from God knows where to fix your $12 drive.