I have an SanDisk 64GB USB Drive, and sadly, it got heavily corrupted. I was copying something over, and it got pulled out in middle of an I/O Write process, resulting in it being completely unusable.
I've plugged it into my Windows 10, and first thing I noticed, was the extreme overall slowliness and explorer crashing (including desktop) of my computer. I attempted to look at the partitioning scheme, and diskmgmt.msc wouldn't load at all - it'd be stuck at "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service" or some other message, which usually go through in a matter of seconds. Attemping to start up diskpart, even that failed. It would hang at my computer name, apparently not willing to show the DISKPART >, indicating the "shell" is ready to be used. Another relevant thing I noticed was the message in Devices and Printers / Device Manager displaying a message similar to This USB could run at faster speed if using USB 3.0 or something in that sense. The thing was, the 3.0 USB in an 3.0 port (100% sure) would act like an 2.0. It even was called SanDisk Traveler 3.0.
I dumped an Ubuntu (and later many other distros) live on my other USB, and booted in. I'd go straight to GParted, as that tool proved useful in similar cases. And there it came: I/O Error [Retry/Ignore/Abort]. I'd give it a go and click ignore atleast 20 times, consuming a lot of time... When it finally finished loading, I'd switch over to /dev/sdc and see an black unknown partition, with a GParted unsupported filesystem warning. I would attempt to make a new drive partitioning scheme to wipe it out completely and start out clean, but, I'd choose gpt, msdos or even ext4 and whatnot, but immediately upon pressing the OK/Submit button, it would freeze, and the whole I/O error ignore spamming thing could start over. I Ignore'd through, and believe it or not, it actually managed to get a clean partition table with a filesystem. Tada, problem solved.
But here comes the plot twist. Don't question me on this one, but the same pull-out-during-I/O-process thing happened again. And as I realized later on, I wasn't as lucky this time. The whole thing repeated again, only this time, I had to click ignore like 50 times not exaggerating, the USB now showing as unpartitioned without a scheme, and creating the partition scheme would fail in the end. I tried it again and again begging GParted, but to no avail. I just threw it on a shelf and it sat there for a few months.
Now I tried to make it work by unknown means (and also posting here), and there were a few changes (perhaps the gparted wiping did it's thing atleast partially?). First of all, diskpart did load, but every command/loading took about 20 seconds to output. Same with right-clicking the USB in the explorer, or for the gui to pop up when clicking Format.... Extremely slow, but atleast some I/O read/writes, It didn't slow my PC anymore, and the 2.0 error doesn't come up as well, but it still crashes the explorer and refuses to be wiped. diskmgmt.msc still won't come up. Right now it's RAW with 0 bytes size according to properties. Don't quote me on this one, but I think I tried and failed with dd trying to write something/erase the drive, it would say something like device non-existent or could not write etc. chkdsk and similar linux-based tools failed to find a problem/diagnose because of unsupported filesystem.
If there is any way to recover this USB, I'd be really grateful for it function, as you can imagine 64GB is quite an amount and right now shops aren't really accessible. I do not care about zeroing, losing data or even breaking apart the case of the disk. There is no write-protection switch or anything you could find on an SanDisk (that there can be from what I've heard?). I didn't find a case with the symptoms of mine on any of StackExchange websites or online, so It'd be rather unfortunate if this was marked as a duplicate.
Thanks in advance for any answers or tips at all.
EDIT: If I attempt to double-click the USB Drive in explorer (it's detected as an USB Drive), it hangs for a while and then tells me to insert a disk into it. Any attempts to format it via explorer fail. It gets detected as an drive in Device Manager, with no error codes, and diskpart shows the attribute read-only as false.
