It's easy to give up on a USB flash drive especially when a Windows OS can't seem to detect it anymore. Flash drives rarely fail unless they're the boutique-type found in stuffed toys, flashlights, souvenirs, company giveaways and bags. Besides physical damage, one of the most common reason why a USB flash drive "stops working" in Windows is a corrupted file partition table or a unique file partition table Windows can't recognize.
Kingston provides pretty good documentation on fixing their portable storage products but when you're dealing with a flash drive with no brand and Windows Disk Management can't detect the drive for formatting, it's time to run Linux, or in this case openSUSE.
openSUSE's YaST2 Expert Partitioner isn't as well-known as GParted, which comes with most Debian-based Linux distributions. However, if you're running the excellent openSUSE 12.x releases or have an openSUSE 12.3 Rescue CD with you, then you can fix USB flash drives in a jiffy with YaST2 Expert Partitioner.
This simple tutorial will use as an example three USB flash drives. The first is a VERBATIM Store N' Go loaded with a bootable Archlinux system. The unique partition table of Arch prevents even Lubuntu or openSUSE from using it as a storage drive or even accessing the contents of the drive. In contrast, LiveUSB's for Linux Mint and Knoppix can still double as storage as long as there is space available. The second example is a no-brand USB flash drive I have with me loaded with PC-BSD, a popular FreeBSD variant. This particular Flash drive suffers from the same challenges as the Archlinux-loaded Flash drive - it can't be used for storage and Windows can't detect it either. A third non-branded and "broken" 1GB flash drive I used for testing is a corrupted flash drive that MacOSX and Windows can no longer detect properly. Windows prompted to format this drive but failed in recovering the storage space. After formatting using diskmgmt.msc, Windows was only able to use 512MB of the 2GB flash drive.
To use YaST2 Expert Partitioner to fix a USB flash drive:
1. Plug the USB drive into your USB port. openSUSE will immediately notify you that a storage device has been plugged in. It may even tell you if the drive is accessible or not. For the VERBATIM Store N' Go, openSUSE cannot access the Arch files stored inside but will mount the drive.
2. Launch Yast2 Partitioner by running YaST or pressing ALT+F2 and then searching for Partitioner. Partitioner will prompt for root and warn you of the dangers of using a disk utility. For a drive with partition table errors, a message will be displayed indicating that it is unreadable and you cannot modify the USB's partitions directly.
3. On the left panel, click the tree listing the detected storage drives. In this scenario, openSUSE found the VERBATIM Store N' Go as sdb1. If you're somewhat confused as to which storage device is your USB flash drive, check the storage size.
4. The Overview tab will offer options such as Edit, Move, Resize, and Delete. To recover a typical drive filled with corrupted or unusable data, we would normally use the delete or edit option to format the drive. Unfortunately, due to the reasons I mentioned earlier, Partitioner will inform you that it can't delete or wipe out the contents of the VERBATIM and instead advises you to create a new partition table.
5. Click the Partitions tab. On the lower right-hand side, click the dropdown list and select Create New Partition table.
6. Partitioner will request for the partition table type. For compatibility with MacOSX and Windows machines, select MSDOS. A warning will follow telling you that creating a new partition table will destroy all the data.
Using YaST2 Partitioner to fix USB Flash drives Part 2
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