Hi
I don’t have opinions about most of the things you mentioned here wrt Windows, privacy, etc.
If you are looking for information on how to recover a drive that shows up as damaged, I would start with these 2 resources -
- Etcher killed my USB stick
-
https://www.balena.io/blog/did-etcher-break-my-usb-sd-card/
Check out the form thread above, where some folks have mentioned how they fixed their drives. If you are on Linux, you can try Gparted. I have used it successfully before to recover such misbehaving drives.