USB flash drive losing data.

[Gat Pelsinger]

I have a USB flash drive lying around on which I wanted to load Debian installer. In the past, I handled it very carelessly. The actual chip itself came out of the drive body (the chip is so small! I used to think the body also contains stuff to hold data) and was lying in the dust sometimes. I did plug it in and the data that was on there was still accessible. But when now, through Rufus when I try to burn the Debian dvd image (ISO mode), it would write successfully, but when I unplug the drive and put it back in after a while, all the data is gone. A few times chkdsk went haywire and only once I got the data to stay. But then to correctly fix the drive, I first used the clean all command in diskpart. Then when writing the image through Rufus, I also checked to look out for bad sectors (1 pass). I think the test passed but when the image data was being written, my drive disconnected somehow (not physically, maybe), but this happens many times with my USB drives and so I re-ran the burning the ISO into the drive. After it was completed, I was able to access the drive correctly, and to verify, I ran chkdsk and no errors were found. But then I unplugged the drive for a while and put it back in, and again, all data was gone. By all data, I mean even the partition. It was a blank drive. I then ran a flash driver tester software to check for bad sectors and no errors were found. Also, I forgot to mention once that I was able to burn the ISO image and ran chkdsk, but it said the drive format is RAW and chkdsk cannot proceed, when I was able to perfectly navigate through file explorer. Everything is super weird, why is my drive acting like RAM?

[Needfuldoer]

USB flash drives are disposable commodities. If it's not working reliably, replace it.

[Murasaki]

Thats actually kinda cool, you have portable yet volatile storage lmao. But indeed that is completely unreliable as a storage medium so I'd keep it for fun and just get a new flash drive.