I've got this USB Kingston DT50 8 GB and I was using it for a couple of weeks without a hassle, It was running pretty fine and fast compared to the other USB's I had used in the past.
One week I wanted to install Windows 10 on my another laptop which is older than the one I'm typing on right now, and during the ISO imaging to the USB drive, the progress bar stopped for a while, this was using PowerISO Create bootable USB Drive option from the Tools menu.
This was really unexpected because I've never experienced such an issue, I waited and waited and... waited. Nothing happened.
Then I've got to the point where I was like Screw it and I unplugged the USB.
Plugged it back in and what now.. nothing. The USB displayed as USB Drive (F:) in This PC folder, upon opening I was greeted with a message You need to format the disk in drive F: before you can use it.
As every experienced user with computers I clicked No and another explorer message popped out saying F:\ drive is not accessible which I believe is the usual message Windows displays.
So I tried using something like HxD to access RAW Data from the physical disk. This would allow me to delete or replace data on the device. What I did was write a small string at the sector 0 saying "Hello World", upon saving the HxD would hang up, again unexpected behavior and I waited until the HxD popped a system message saying The system cannot find the file specified
The interesting part is that after unplugging the drive, plugging it back and seeing the physical data once again, only the first character was saved, the character H and the other ello World wasn't even there, the data was untouched, I tried sector 1 on the different offset and the same thing happens.
I'm starting to think that the microcontroller on the USB is dead or something else is stopping it from writing more than 8 bits of data to the drive, I tried formatting it on the Linux via fdisk and it doesn't do anything, not even on the physical level of the drive, I checked with HxD and no data was changed.
But again if the microcontroller was dead, I wouldn't get any data from the USB in the first place, hence the built-in USB name in the firmware or the appearance in USBDeview. It's interesting..
And then I got to this question on superuser during the writing this entire thing down, and I tried it on the USB, only the first sector was modified, I started thinking there was hope but trying again it would hang up and nothing changed after the first sector (sector 0).
I really don't know what else should I write. I tried making a bootable USB drive, the PowerISO hanged up due to the USB denying anything, I even tried diskpart's clean command and I get greeted with the message
DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
Really don't know what is the problem here. Linux didn't work, and many other tools didn't, expect HxD worked to some extent but I can only change one byte per try, which is unintentional for example the entire sector which takes 512 characters, that is 512 times unplugging, plugging, writing, saving on/the USB.
I don't think the USB is dying, but it could be the case though.
Anyone else have something to prefer!? (by the way: I tried EaseUS, didn't work)
Edit 1: I had asked the store to get the replacement, but they've refused it.
