I/O Error on old USB drive - Any fixes?

[DudderButter]

I tried formatting a 4GB USB drive (that had a Zorin OS Lite ISO flashed to it) in the Command Prompt in Windows. Originally, it gave me an "Access is denied" error when I would select and try to clean it in Diskpart. Now when I try to clean it, it tells me that the drive is not accessible anymore because of an I/O device error. I don't have anything valuable on this USB. I would like to be able to access it again if possible. It has been through a lot of reading/writing actions in the past couple of days.

 

[JaapDaniels]

I tried formatting a 4GB USB drive (that had a Zorin OS Lite ISO flashed to it) in the Command Prompt in Windows. Originally, it gave me an "Access is denied" error when I would select and try to clean it in Diskpart. Now when I try to clean it, it tells me that the drive is not accessible anymore because of an I/O device error. I don't have anything valuable on this USB. I would like to be able to access it again if possible. It has been through a lot of reading/writing actions in the past couple of days.

• First try partitioning it (with any partitioning tool you can find...
• Try guiformat to format it.
• Look in the conector for damaged contacts, find a small enough tool to clean the contacts with alcohol anyway.
• Open the usb stick cover to see if there is a broken solder point (and resolder those).
• Replace the connector.

if these don't help i'm out of idea's and since these sticks commonly are cheap i'd sugest to stop here.

 

[ElSasori69]

• First try partitioning it (with any partitioning tool you can find...
• Try guiformat to format it.
• Look in the conector for damaged contacts, find a small enough tool to clean the contacts with alcohol anyway.
• Open the usb stick cover to see if there is a broken solder point (and resolder those).
• Replace the connector.

if these don't help i'm out of idea's and since these sticks commonly are cheap i'd sugest to stop here.

That covers all the basics, but I personally will start with cleaning, also looking for damaged connectors for the last, and unless someone have some very important info on the pendrive I don't think its worth it to physically repair it, they are not that expensive, so if cleaning and looking partitioning the pendrive doesn't work... just buy another pendrive, although I have to add, don't toss away your pendrive, It has happened to me that an old pendrive that I thinked It no longer works, It will work after some months on the box, this has happened to me like 4 times (yeah I have a lot of pendrives, like 12) my oldest pendrive is from 2007 (Kingston 128 MB) and all of them are working until now.