Recovering usb drives

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Foppo94
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed 21 Jun 2017, 11:22

Recovering usb drives

#1 Post by Foppo94 »

Hello, i am a quite new linux user, and i appreciated so much the puppy linux community, expecially because i can see that the whole idea behind this OS is wonderful.
But playing around with usb drives so many times, using unetbootin, the command dd, and startup disk creator of ubuntu, got me to spoil a lot of usb drives. More precisely, they sometimes had their space reduced, and in some cases (often after using startup disk creator) they weren’t able to boot linux distros anymore.
Some results (recovering some space) were obtained using gparted, expecially creating a new partition tab (if the process didn’t work, i first create a gpt table, then msdos table, then the usb was recovered).
But using gparted didn’t restore the ability to boot distros, these usbs were corrupted yet for some reason that i don’t know.
The final solution was using the startup disk creator itself, and in particular its feature to erase the usb mounted. The last versions of this software don’t have this feature, so i used an old version installed on 12.04 ubuntu by default.
Probably you can get this old version of startup disk creator also not using the whole ubuntu12.04 that i installed on a usb for this purpose, but i didn’t know well how to do
The ubuntu 12.04 startup disk creator restored all my spoiled usb drives in few seconds, it worked greatly.

I hope this could be useful to you, sorry for my english and my lack of synthesis :)

cthisbear
Posts: 4422
Joined: Sun 29 Jan 2006, 22:07
Location: Sydney Australia

#2 Post by cthisbear »

Foppo94:

thanks mate and welcome to Puppy.

Chris.

jafadmin
Posts: 1249
Joined: Thu 19 Mar 2009, 15:10

#3 Post by jafadmin »

I just use "dd" to overwrite the first 100 meg of the USB device, then use gparted to create a new partition table, new partitions, and set boot flag.

Code: Select all

# dd bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX count=100
After this operation, remove and re-insert the thumb drive in question before re-partitioning so the system sees it correctly.

I've never had this fail to rehabilitate a USB flash drive ..

peterw
Posts: 430
Joined: Wed 19 Jul 2006, 12:12
Location: UK

Restoring USBs

#4 Post by peterw »

And if you are a Windows user and nervous of using the dd command then you can restore those USB sticks with the HP programme which is the industry standard http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-St ... 74082.html .

And if you muck up SDHC cards you can restore them with: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/. Unfortunately, because of DRM programmes to restore SDHC's are only available for Windows and Macs.
Last edited by peterw on Sun 06 Aug 2017, 20:47, edited 3 times in total.

peterw
Posts: 430
Joined: Wed 19 Jul 2006, 12:12
Location: UK

Other options for Windows users

#5 Post by peterw »

Could not get last post to work. This is a repeat.
And if you are a Windows user and nervous of using the dd command then you can restore those USB sticks with the HP programme which is the industry standard http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-St ... 74082.html .

And if you muck up SDHC cards you can restore them with: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/. Unfortunately, because of DRM programmes to restore SDHC's are only available for Windows and Macs.

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