Fedora MediaWriter made usb drive unusable

[DilanRona]

As stated in the title, I used media writer to write Fedora Gaming to a USB. USB would not boot after I tried it, initial searching said the issue was most usb drives are formatted for NTFS, and not FAT32. So I inserted the stick into a windows machine the next day, getting ready to format the drive.

Drive is completely unusable now, and its a brand new usb that was never used before. Windows cannot detect a volume. So I tried Gnome-Disks, fdisk, parted, and diskpart on windows in an effort to fix the usb, and they all failed. Error messages in all cases boils down to a "no volume in selected disk". Cannot clear the disk, cannot create any partitions, nothing.

[grulja]

You should be able to recover your USB drive using Fedora Media Writer. It should detect there is a Fedora image on it and offer you to restore your drive. In order to recover your drive using other tools, I believe you will have to write a new partition table first.

[DilanRona]

Tried to recover it with media writer. Only options it showed is Download iso, and select iso. No option to restore or repair. Every other tool for Linux and Windows cannot detect any volume, and will not allow the creation of new volumes or partitions.

[grulja]

Try to write a yet another Fedora image on it and when going back to the main menu, there should be option to recover your drive. Where did you write your image? Was it on Windows or on Linux?

Try to use e.g. GParted and when selecting the drive, go to Device > Create Partition Table.

[DilanRona]

Image was written from Fedora 38. Mediawriter cannot pick up the usb at all, regardless how many times I tried. Verified that its in the dev directory, and it does show up as /dev/sdb in my case. But cannot select the usb from Mediawriter.

GParted doesnt list the drive either. When I start it from the command line, passing /dev/sdb it throws out an error, and will not go further.

[grulja]

I'm afraid that your drive is probably damaged, but I don't think FMW is responsible for that as on Linux we are writing the same way as you would do dd if=path/image_name.iso of=device command that is being used for years. I just tried to write a Fedora Games image on an USB drive and it works just fine, I can see an option to recover my drive in FMW.

What does sudo fdisk -l says?

[grulja]

Ping? Have you been able to recover your drive or not?

[dbpodrasky]

Same issue for me, on two different USB drives. FMW is a hot mess.

[thunderpants]

I had the same problem after installing Fedora Atomic iso while on PopOS.
Couldn't wipe the usb through the usual ways or with Fedora writer.
Tried on Linux and Win10.
I got my usb back though i can't remember what did it or if it just bugged out and cleared the partitions.
I do remember using GParted while i was on Zorin 17.1 to delete the partitions though there an error warning . But when i booted up win10 and checked it on Disk Management it was empty ,no partitions at all and i quickly made a new 64gb NTFS partition .

Reminds me of balenaEtcher when it first appeared on the scene . That was doing similar stuff to usb drives.
Totally killed one of my usbs ,though it has improved a lot since then.

[DilanRona]

wasnt able to recover that usb, cant even format it on windows, or linux using the standard format tools. And I even tried removing and creating partitions. Failed. On Tuesday 29 August 2023 at 13:40:23 GMT+2, Jan Grulich ***@***.***> wrote: Ping? Have you been able to recover your drive or not? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>