"Create USB Startup Disk" permamently kills thumb drive?

[nexus_2006]

I had a 2GB memorex thumbdrive that was about 4 years old. I used the utility in 8.10 to make it into a live install disk, and it worked well. I have not been able to use it for anything else, ever. Gparted wiped the partitions and formatted a nice clean ext3 part on the drive, but it won't mount. Tried formatting again as a fat32, the GF's computer will not recognize the device at all. Probably the drive just died, or this utility makes the USB drive a startup disk permamently.

What I'm asking, basically, is if I use the new 4GB USB drive I bought today as an install disk using this utility (I'm running 9.04 right now), will the new drive be trash after that?

thanks

[sanderj]

First of all: congrats with your 100st post "Beans: 100". ;-)

About your post: I've experienced the same. I had a hard time really, really cleaning and formatting the USB stick after a failed Ubuntu-live-install.

So: try a few different clean & format methods, and your old stick will probably be OK.

And you don't have to worry about killing a new stick.

[dabl]

It's probably a goner. However, I would give it one more chance, and use "dd" to lobotomize it, and then try formatting it FAT32 again.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3090824.0

Be very very certain that you know the device number of the USB stick -- get it from
fdisk -lu before you run "dd". If you get it wrong, you could lobotomize your hard drive instead, losing everything. :(

Assuming for this case that the USB stick is /dev/sdf in your system, then


sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf bs=512 count=1

will overwrite the partition table and render the USB stick "as new". Then use GParted, when it prompts choose "ms-dos" for the new partition table type, make a single partition (the whole stick) and then format it FAT32. Then run some tests and see if it's going to hold up. If not, it's dumpster food.

[nexus_2006]

Thanks for the replies so quick. I'll try the recovery method mentioned with a live CD and my HDD disconnected. I'm 99% confidant I can do it properly (been using *NIX as mt primary OS for about 5 years, thanks for the 100 post congrat), but I want to be 100% sure, just spent 4 hours using gparted to move and resize my partitions. At least now I know that I won't kill a new USB drive this way. I'll post the results later.