Old long story of failing USB flash drives

[lcfiorini]

Hello forum,

I have at least 5 or 6 USB failed flash drives that happened to become faulty a few years ago. Let me explain what happened:


1. Everything began with the acquisition of a brand new 128 Gb PNY conventional USB flash drive bought in a trip to the United States in 2016 (Orlando, Fl.). I'm specifying where I bought it (BestBuy stores) because this means I assume it was in perfect reliable condition, without any falsifying or otherwise misusing attempts.

2. The USB drive at first appeared to be just like any other ordinary USB flash drive and to work properly back in 2016

3. I had another SanDisk USB flash drive without problems either - but then I made the worst mistake possible:

4. I copied the original SanDisk files and folders to this new 128 Gb PNY USB flash drive in order to encrypt this new 128 Gb PNY flash drive with the Sandisk SecureAccess encrypting program. I executed and encrypted the SanDisk program in this new 128 Gb PNY USB flash drive because I didn't want it to be readable by other people at my work, where it was supposed to be used as my backup unit.

5. The program didn't seem to have worked as expected and this new PNY 128 Gb USB flash drive started to present weird behaviors on an unreliable basis, sometimes being recognized by the computer and sometimes not. Everytime the flash drive was recognized it was readable and writable without encryption neither requiring the password typed by the encryption process.

6. Since then this USB flash drive became unrecognized by any PC, remaining unreadable and unwriteable. It is seldom recognized by the PC when plugged in and it was never used again ever since, despite being full of files I'd like to recover.

7. I was resigning myself to have lost this expensive USB flash drive by the end of 2016 unless something else seemed to become even worse and more complicated: my work PC seemed to be infected by a (some) virus(es), especially those related to flash drives's autorun.inf file, and the same behavior started to happen with previously normal USB flash drives whenever I inserted other USB flash drives from home into my work PC - which was promplty screened by an antivirus by me. Now I have 5 or 6 old USB flash drives, some of them which were used in my personal portable devices and are now completely useless.

8. In an attempt to rescue these faulty USB flash drives I've downloaded dozens of programs which promised to repair them, including TestDisk, Recuva portable, ChipGenius, HDDScan, HPUSBDisk, RmPrep and other not-so-known software, all of them without success. All of the USB flash drives now are seldom recognized neither by Windows Explorer nor by Windows Disk Management Tool nor by TestDisk nor by (for now) any other programs, except those aimed to retrieve firmware information or other identification details of these devices, and show a drive empty space of 0b. Sometimes I'm lucky enough one or other program(s) is able to recognize the drive's presence, but always as a ghost drive with 0 bytes inaccessible for them or either for Windows 10 itself.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Leonardo.

[recuperation]

Insert your USB drives into a different clean and healthy linux machine to see what happens.
If not being recognized or being read-only, contact a professional data recovery company.

[lcfiorini]

Hello everybody, here I come again.

Some good news after all this mess: I'm on vacations this week and took a time to revisit this old problem of mine. After all this years of such a disaster it seems I managed to find a (partial) solution to the flash memory cards which became undetectable after being plugged into the same computer where the original procedure started. Let me remind you what I did: I had several 32 Gb SanDisk memory cards, all of them with the SecurAccess preinstalled, an encryption program for safeguarding your files from curious eyes.

I took this program (SanDisk SecurAccess), which came in these 32 Gb SanDisk memory cards, copied it to a brand new PNY 128 Gb USB stick and executed it from this 128 Gb USB stick in an attempt to encrypt this 128 Gb USB stick. The program didn't perform as expected and I was now with all of these 32 Gb SanDisk memory cards AND the 128 Gb USB stick with unreliable faulty behavior. In the long term they became unreadable almost anywhere, even by (flash memory)USB-specialized software like TestDisk, RmPrep and similars. After being stored for almost 5 years I'm revisiting them now trying to find a solution and it seems that I was able to restore AT LEAST these 32 Gb SanDisk memory cards according to SanDisk's last resource procedure indicated in the webpage

https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/205

After following the instructions detailed in this webpage AT LEAST the 32 Gb SanDisk memory cards seemed to have come back to ordinary expected behavior for flash memory cards/flash memory USB sticks. The 128 Gb USB stick where the program was run is still undetectable by windows and other specialized software. Despite having lost this expensive USB stick, at least I was successful to restore these 32 Gb SanDisk memory cards, at least in the last 5 days. As long as they remain fully functional they will continue to be used routinely by my picture and video capturing devices such as smartphones, digital cameras, GoPro Hero and similars. If something else happens I come back here with extra details as I've just done now.

P.S.: URL addresses changes rather fast, and to avoid the risk of having indicated an URL supposed to be soon outdated, I took a screenshot which is attached to this post with the SanDisk recommended procedure. The same picture is available from my cloud storage service too in the following URL:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!ArTLbiQi-DUYmTyRbOPCx0smhR2a