San Disk Ultra Media 32G USB - No Formating or change of ownership status possible

[LostInTerminal]

Hello guys,

this is my first time creating an account on a forum website. I am pretty lost and couldn't find any help to my specific situation on the websites I looked at. Maybe one of you guys has any ideas on how to solve my issue or maybe someone of you actually came across an existing thread that resembles my issue.

So here it goes, recently I had my netbook unattended for a couple of hours and with my USB stick still in the port via an USB hub. When I came back, I saw that my USB stick got disconnected in the meanwhile. After putting the stick back in I am now faced with the following issue:

It say under information that this USB Stick is now only readable so I cant edit or delete any of my data now. I tried to solve the issue with deleting the data via the diskutil commands in the terminal. It stated that I needed the Ownership rights to delete data. I then tried the ownership commands, first it told me the device is not mounted, I tried to do solve that via the mountDisk command and the terminal came back with a successful mount, but after trying the enableOwnership command it came back with the following error:

"A disk with a mount point is required (-69854)"

When I tried the repair command it comes back with:

"Unable to repair this whole disk: A writable disk is required (-69772)"

And as I said before when I try deleting either the disk or Volume it runs back with the error that I need ownership of the USB stick...

So I am lost...

Thank you in advance for looking at my problem and any ideas that come to mind I was able to save all the data and do another back up, I just want to be able to use the USB stick again and regain my 32G space

 

[LostInTerminal]

Hey guys, just a little bit more additional info. I just tried again to delete the data, this time by just erasing the Volume on the disk, but this is what came back: "Error: -69874: Couldn't modify partition map"

 

[casperes1996]

Have you tried simply using the Disk Utility app on the whole disk?

Have you tried the eraseDisk command?

Is there a physical toggle on the drive to toggle read-only that you could flip on and off?

 

[LostInTerminal]

Thank you for your feedback @casperes1996

I tried the different approaches, but it still didn't work unfortunately.

1. Using Disk Utility app on the whole disk:

"Medium is being unmounted
The device could not be opened.
Action failed..."

2. Using eraseDisk command:

"Philipps-MacBook-Pro:~ philippbutenschon$ diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk2
Volume(s) mounted successfully
Philipps-MacBook-Pro:~ philippbutenschon$ diskutil eraseDisk ExFAT PHILIPP /dev/disk2
Started erase on disk2
Unmounting disk
Error: -69877: Couldn't open device"

3. Physical toggle on the drive to toggle read-only on and off.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any physical toggle. I took a thorough look at my stick but there was nothing...

Do you guys maybe have any additional/other advise?
Or could it be possible that this USB is "gone" forever :/

 

[casperes1996]

Do you guys maybe have any additional/other advise?
Or could it be possible that this USB is "gone" forever :/

It's possible that it's dead, yes. Some manufacturers even intentionally block writes to a drive after a certain number of bytes have been written to it, so that the NAND doesn't mysteriously die and data already on it disappear. That could be what's happening.

But I do have one final bullet; GDisk.

You seem to know your way around Terminal commands, so install gdisk with home-brew
brew cask install gdisk

Point it to the drive (with sudo) and use the interactive memory it gives you to completely redo the partition table (GPT I would advise, but up to you if you want a Master Boot Record table)