USB Stuck in read mode only

The Electroclassic · June 13, 2019

Hey guys, I come here to you to ask for some urgent tech support.

A little back story, yesterday, my mac mini crashed, and upon reboot, the infamous "Prohibitory Symbol" appeared on the screen, upon researching (read: posting on /r/AppleHelp) I decided to reinstall the OS. I brought my 32GB usb drive to the game, and re-downloaded macOS Mojave on a second mac to format it to the drive. But halfway through the process the drive decided to eject itself from the computer. (Here's where my question lands) I wanted to format it to try to restart the process, but macOS won't mount the drive, and Ubuntu refuses to format it because it's "a read-only drive". Running

dosfsck

says that The Logical Volume is Zero (or something along those lines) and it fails to mount it. I'm reinstalling Mojave through an SD card in this very moment on my mac mini but I still want to recover that drive. Any ideas on what I can do?

Electronics Wizardy · June 13, 2019

Probably a bad usb drive, they often fail read only. Id toss it.

Nettly_ · June 13, 2019

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Probably a bad usb drive, they often fail read only. Id toss it.

I am almost 100% sure that yeah its a bad USB, no reason to keep it. I had this happen 3 times, could not find any fixes online and my tomfoolery did nothing to help with that either. Toss it and buy a new one.