I did exactly that the other week to install a new distro on a thinkpad, when my usb stick turned sour. Not ideal, but I had no other option available. Shops closed and all that. However, take into account, modern bios systems can play a trick on you, when booting from a usb-HDD/SSD.
But in terms of your usb sticks: you are indicating you cannot format these. Are they being recognized? Meaning, do they indicate a drive number? Have you tried to use device manager? What does it tell you when you put the sticks in?
you could use diskpart from the commandline to restore your usb sticks after using this command: Get-PnpDevice
Message appears stating need to be formatted, click YES to format
Have tried but format as FAT32 and NTFS, fails.
I tried a while back going into Disk Manager to format. Same issue. Can't get around it.
It's possible that it messed up when I had it inserted into a client provided laptop that had BitLocker enforced on all drives. And now with stick inserted into different laptop, I have no RWX ability.
You could try and restore from superblock, later on, once you have linux running on live-cd or installed.
if live -cd, take careful note of the drivenumbers, so not to mix things up, because the live -cd is also sourced from a USB connection. The size usually gives it away.
On Linux CLI
<<<LSUSB>>
See if it is recognized correctly.
<<<lsblk>>>
Find the drive number. Usually something like sda/ sda1/sda2 or sdb/sdb1/sdb/2
<<<dumpe2fs /dev/sdX | grep superblock>>
Find the list of superblocks available. When the first does not work, try another.
Usually, you should see something like:
Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-6
Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32774
Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98310
Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163846
<<<fsck -b superblock-number /dev/sdX>>>
If CLI asks to fix something, enter yes.
Once done, mount it
<<<mount /dev/sdX /mnt>>>
and go from there. sdX = drive you need restoring.
I did exactly that the other week to install a new distro on a thinkpad, when my usb stick turned sour. Not ideal, but I had no other option available. Shops closed and all that. However, take into account, modern bios systems can play a trick on you, when booting from a usb-HDD/SSD.
But in terms of your usb sticks: you are indicating you cannot format these. Are they being recognized? Meaning, do they indicate a drive number? Have you tried to use device manager? What does it tell you when you put the sticks in?
you could use diskpart from the commandline to restore your usb sticks after using this command: Get-PnpDevice
or <<<Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match '^USB' } | Format-List>>>
However, if you were to install a linux distro via your usb-hdd/ssd, your options to get a usb working again, multiply.
Thanks for thoughful reply fren.
One 4GB Stick is recognized. Shows drive number.
I tried a while back going into Disk Manager to format. Same issue. Can't get around it.
It's possible that it messed up when I had it inserted into a client provided laptop that had BitLocker enforced on all drives. And now with stick inserted into different laptop, I have no RWX ability.
You could try and restore from superblock, later on, once you have linux running on live-cd or installed.
if live -cd, take careful note of the drivenumbers, so not to mix things up, because the live -cd is also sourced from a USB connection. The size usually gives it away.
On Linux CLI
<<<LSUSB>>
See if it is recognized correctly.
<<<lsblk>>>
Find the drive number. Usually something like sda/ sda1/sda2 or sdb/sdb1/sdb/2
<<<dumpe2fs /dev/sdX | grep superblock>>
Find the list of superblocks available. When the first does not work, try another. Usually, you should see something like:
<<<fsck -b superblock-number /dev/sdX>>>
If CLI asks to fix something, enter yes.
Once done, mount it <<<mount /dev/sdX /mnt>>>
and go from there. sdX = drive you need restoring.
Good luck!
Thanks.