USB Thumb drive WAY corrupt

[shannondoko]

I have a super talent 4GB usb drive. I was showing someone a song on it, they plugged it into their printer (windows machine) while it was installing the driver and doing its thing, he unplugged it (Why, I don't know.) Now, when I plug it in, it is recognized as "SKYMEDI USB DRIVE" It also thinks it is 2TB, which obviously is completely wrong.

Is there a way in linux to rebuild the physical sectors back to the way it was? or is it gone for good? I read that article on how linux saved a usb drive, but I'm pretty sure mine is a little more dead. Here is the article I read.

I should also mention, that I don't eve care about the data, as I have it all backed up.

I just want my drive to work..

[objuan]

Well I have experienced this in the pass with one of my 120 Gb usb drives.
I figured it was toast but I re-formated the usb drive with VFAT and I am still using it today. Give it a try if it is toast you have nothing to lose.

[shannondoko]

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
mkfs.vfat: Will not try to make filesystem on full-disk device '/dev/sdb' (use -I if wanted)

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb -I
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
mkfs.vfat: unable to allocate space for FAT image in memory

parted /dev/sdb
Floating point exception

fdisk /dev/sdb
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.

You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

The shred command gives a million IO errors..

Any other ideas? or maybe I am doing something wrong?

[kitrule]

I have exactly the same problem, mine was a Kingston DTI/2GB. Now reporting as Ski Medi whatever, 0mb in linux, 2TB in Windows using Paragon Hard Disk Manager. Can't partition it with anything I've tried so far, fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk, gparted. Did you ever manage to fix yours? I can't figure it out. Thanks.

[shannondoko]

haha nobody ever replied. I gave up.