Pendrive is not detecting in any computer

Question

I used my usbdrive to install software in many computer of lab but when i plugged it in a computer then due to virus now it is became unreadable or can not be detected now in any other computer . what to do

Answer 1

The following procedures will destroy all the data in your pendrive

CASE 1: you can use a unix system

• Plug the usb driver in a pc with unix operatig system.

• Open a terminal, hit dmesg and see if the device is recognized by the system and how the device is named by the sistem

For example, in this case the pendrive is sdb:

[ 7218.966183] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 7219.131947] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 15138814 512-byte logical blocks: (7.75 GB/7.22 GiB)
[ 7219.132428] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 7219.132433] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 21 00 00 00
[ 7219.132893] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 7219.137459]  sdb: sdb1 sdb2
[ 7219.139079] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

• If you see like above, keep the pendrive plugged in and hit:

  sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
  sync
  

• At the end of the procedure (cursor is returned by sync), plug your pendrive in any pc and format with a file system (FAT32 or NTFS for example are the most common for windows users).

CASE 2: you have to use windows

If windows is not able to mount the usb drive because of its file system, but the device is recognized, you don't see listed in the file explorer. In this case you can use a software like this http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/ to perform a low level format of your usb drive.