USB Drive (corrupt) write-protected cannot be formatted

[UsedID]

Hello friends,

 

I am a long-time lurker and follower of LTT but I just signed up to the forum in good hopes to get a solution regarding my problem.

First things first: Sorry for my English but I am from Austria.

 

Okay, let´s begin:

 

A friend of mine came to me with an USB drive and he said Windows want´s it to format as soon as he plugs it in and he wants the data on it. He said it happened after a power outage.

 

I thought, "Alright, no problem, I fixed that often enough for other friends".

It is a 2.0 , 16GB , "HAMA" USB-Drive.

 

The disk management utilty showed the thumb drive as RAW with 14,64GB Parition.

 

Drive properties show that there is 0 bytes of  free space and 0 bytes used. (Not a good sign)

 

I did not format the disk and used data-recovery software.

 

I usually have good results with "File Scavenger"- Until now, every time I used it I could recover a lot of data from HDD/SSD and USB - Drives.

This time it failed. I tried the Deep Scan but this also failed.

 

Sometimes when that happens I tried "Test-Disk" with which I had also good experience before.

Sadly with the same outcome. Test-Disk in this case could not even locate a partition.

 

So I went on a journey of other recovery tools I heard about in the past. (Maybe a bit sketchy too)

Stellar Phoenix,

Hetmann Partition,

M3 Data Recovery,

Recuva,

MiniTool etc.

 

None of them could recover any data. 

After many failed attempts and as frustrated as I was I thought:  "Alright, I will try to get some data back after formatting the drive." 

So I tried to format the disk and got the message, that the drive cannot be formatted because it´s write - protected. I found that quite strange.

The USB-Stick has now switch etc.

 

So I tried the also usual attempts like diskpart command "attributes disk clear readonly" and also the regedit "StorageDevicePolicies" - "WriteProtect" with a value of 0.

I still get the same message

 

I googled a bit more and there I found the suggestion to flash the drive. I don´t know how and I also don´t know if that´s a good idea.

 

This is what I found out with ChipEasy:

 

Logical drive   : E:\            Capacity:  0.0G
Device ID       : VID = 1221     PID = 3234
Device SN       : 3727053FA85B866720485
Device version  : 2.F0

Device vendor   : Flash
Device model    : USB Disk
Protocol        : USB2.0
Max power       : 100mA

Partition type  :                Device active   : no
Aligned state   : 0 KB, Have been Aligned

Controller      : Micov
Controller model: MW8209/MW8219/MXT8208
Flash Vendor    : SanDisk 

 

Is there any chance I can get the data back ? Or format the Drive even tough it says it´s write-protected.

 

Thank you in advance.

Regards,

UsedID

[KarathKasun]

Data recovery is likely a no-go unless you have the equipment to read the raw flash.

 

Some 3rd party partition tools allow you to fix this problem by low level formatting the stick.  Just had this issue myself, caused by a flaky USB hub.

 

AFAIK, many USB sticks keep part of the operating configuration on the flash used for file storage.  With this setup, corruption of the storage area causes the flash controller to enter an error state.  This locks write access and may garble any data it can see on the drive because it no longer knows how the flash chip is organized.

[UsedID]

1 minute ago, KarathKasun said:

Data recovery is likely a no-go unless you have the equipment to read the raw flash.

 

Some 3rd party partition tools allow you to fix this problem by low level formatting the stick.  Just had this issue myself, caused by a flaky USB hub.

Can you recommend any 3rd party tool ? Which one did you use ?

 

[KarathKasun]

2 minutes ago, UsedID said:

Can you recommend any 3rd party tool ? Which one did you use ?

 

I found an internal flash tool that is of questionable legality (IDK if it has been made legally public by the company) so I can't tell you more about it here.

 

Check Easeus and see if it works for you (link).  Some other advanced disk management tools can also do this, but my research for this was on another PC that was wiped yesterday.

 

Google around and the answers are pretty easy to find.  I think I spent an hour digging through posts and tools to find a combination that worked for me.

[Yvette222]

I have to say that this drive may have been damaged physically. Many data recovery programs have the same scan method, since 7+ programs failed to find your data, i think it's better to send the drive to professional data recovery service. Good luck!