[SOLVED] Cannot access USB stick

[HyperHacker]

My USB stick was working yesterday, but I got a bit of static shock as I pulled it out of another machine, and now it's not mounting. However it does show up in lsusb, and /dev/sdg appears when I plug it in, but commands like fdisk say "unable to open" or "no medium found." Is there any hope for it?

[oz]

Try it in another machine if you can to see if it will work there. You could also try running gparted on it to see if you might have better luck, although you probably won't. If you can't get it going, check your manufacturer warranty because some USB sticks have quite long warranty periods, and some of them are very good about honoring the warranty. I recently had one replaced without having to provide a purchase receipt.

[kahlil88]

Statick shock, eh? You might have fried it. What sort of errors does dmesg give you?

[Rubberman]

Try reformatting the device. If that doesn't work, then I think you have nuked it. In any case, it sounds like the bits got scrambled. You probably are SOL for getting the data back.

[HyperHacker]

dmesg doesn't show any errors, just shows a USB disk drive being connected. Windows does pretty well the same - the device shows up as a drive with no disk inserted. Between that and the fact that on the Windows box, the USB data line leaks into the headphone jack and I can literally hear the data - which sounds like several attempts at reading something and getting a steady stream of nothingness back - I'm pretty certain it's fried. Oh well.