I’ve have years of experience with computers, but never had such problem, and I’ve no idea what to do it this point. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? I’d really appreciate some help. Thanks
Notice that the size that your operating system will display is the size of what’s defined in the partition table, which might be (and will be the case for Ubuntu ISOs) ignoring a part of the drive.
What you need to do is recreate the partition table, and then you can create partitions that make use of your complete drive.
On macOS, I believe you can wipe out the partition table by running diskutil eraseDisk free UNTITLED /dev/diskN on the terminal, where diskN corresponds to your drive (be sure to double check you don’t remove the partition table from another important drive!)
Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: XXXXXX
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 64 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 8 MB 8128 KB
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
Mac OS:
diskutil eraseDisk free UNTITLED /dev/disk3
Started erase on disk3
Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Waiting for partitions to activate
Finished erase on disk3
Linux (Elementary OS):
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes copied, 0.025282 s, 20.3 kB/s
Unfortunately, nothing happens after all that, when I use "sudo fdisk -l" this USB stick is still listed as 8MB:
Hey @waveman – I’ve just had a look at the images you sent us, and it looks like the ChipsBank controller firmware got corrupted somehow, and is spewing out parts of its firmware when being read:
This appears to be a pretty common problem with USB storage devices with chips from ChipsBank, judging by the amount of search results it generates.
There appeared to be a tool to repair those chipsets, called “umptool”, but all currently available sources of it seem a bit shady, while the original source has become unavailable, so I can’t really recommend it. There’s also no tooling available from the manufacturer; http://en.chipsbank.com/support.html
Not sure what a good way forward would be, or whether that drive is still salvageable, unfortunately.
Hej @jhermsmeier - thank you very much for the effort, I’ll try to play with the software you mentioned, I have nothing to loose but might be able to fix it somehow. Since different “umptool” versions are designed for a specific ChipsBank controllers, do you think you can find out somehow the name of it?
Also, since we don’t know how exactly it got corrupted, I’ll tell you when exactly this happened.
The procedure was like this:
I formatted this stick on a Mac, created FAT32 partition on GUID partition map.
I used Etcher to put Elementary OS on it
I didn’t reformat it afterwards
I used Etcher again to put Ubuntu on it (without reformatting it as I already mentioned)
Etcher completed it, but stopped during verification process due to en error (I forgot to make a note of it)
Since then, this USB stick shows only 8MB and it’s unusable.
Maybe this will help to find out it if there was something related to Etcher activity.