I've destroyed 3 USB flash drives trying to image them with Windows ISOs. WTH?

[hoorah]

So I've been trying to get an install image for Windows 7 onto a USB key, a process I've done multiple times before.

Lately, I seem to be killing USB drives in the process. I've tried both with the Windows 7 USB/DVD tool and with RUFUS (2.2 I believe).

Anyway, I pick the USB key, I pick the image, I click "Go", it gets about halfway through and then says it can't write to the destination. The drive disappears. I unplug the USB key and plug it back in, and in 2 cases, I get "USB Device not recognized". In one case, it seems to be recognized as a flash drive, but under disk management in the control panel shows as 0 bytes.

The first two USB keys this happened to were no-name brand cheapos from newegg, but the third one was an ADATA and was brand new out of the package. Size varied between 16 and 32GB.

All of the drives worked fine copying files back and forth before trying to write the ISO. I even tried the process on different computers and got the same results.

What gives? Am I doing something wrong? I've heard that cheap USB drives can fail quickly, but something doesn't seem right here. I'm afraid to test with anything new because the process seems to kill everything.

 

[KingFatty]

Could you have a faulty ISO image file? Or, maybe your hard drive screws up while reading the file, or the USB port is electrically unstable?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've been using the Adata Yellow + Black UV128 drives, mostly 16GB sized, to write Windows and Linux ISOs to, and haven't had any issues, using either Rufus or the MS Media Creation Tool.

Might I suggest you get your USB ports checked out, electrically? I'm not sure how you would go about doing that, however.

What PSU do you have? Is it high quality, or is it a cheap / generic? Is it relatively new, or older?

 

[LTC8K6]

If the ports work fine otherwise, then I think it's down to that file?

 

[hhhd1]

The first two USB keys this happened to were no-name brand cheapos from newegg,

I think that is the issue.

There are VERY cheap flash drives with huge inflated sizes (64gb+), and they appear to work at first, but when you actually try to right to them more than 2gb or 4gb they fail.

( I have no first hand experience, just read on amazon.com reviews on similar flash drives )

 

[hoorah]

Could you have a faulty ISO image file? Or, maybe your hard drive screws up while reading the file, or the USB port is electrically unstable?

The image file seems to work fine when I burn it to a DVD-R?

 

[hoorah]

I've been using the Adata Yellow + Black UV128 drives, mostly 16GB sized, to write Windows and Linux ISOs to, and haven't had any issues, using either Rufus or the MS Media Creation Tool.

Might I suggest you get your USB ports checked out, electrically? I'm not sure how you would go about doing that, however.

What PSU do you have? Is it high quality, or is it a cheap / generic? Is it relatively new, or older?

One system is using USB3.0 and has a 750W power supply, of which I do not remember the name, but it was a name brand. Possibly Corsair. I will have to check. It was relatively new-ish, the system is a cyberpowerPC with an I7-3770K, so of that vintage.

The other system was an HP laptop using USB 2.0.

The most recent drive to fail, right out of the package, was an ADATA UV128 blue/black drive.

 

[master_shake_]

http://www.vercot.com/~serva/

faster better easier.

 

[hoorah]

I have a batch of 3 Sandisk 16GB USB keys I got from Costco awhile back that have always done okay writing ISOs to them. I hate to keep breaking these things, but I will give one of these a try tonight and see if I get the same result.

 

[hainer36]

Is it on a USB3 port? I noticed after using RUFUS on a USB3 drive, on a USB3 port, that drive would not be recognized on a USB3 port again, works fine on USB2 however.

 

[Elixer]

Is it on a USB3 port? I noticed after using RUFUS on a USB3 drive, on a USB3 port, that drive would not be recognized on a USB3 port again, works fine on USB2 however.

Eh? All RUFUS does is write a filesystem/data to the flash drive, nothing more.
It can't change anything in the controller circuitry of the flash drive.
Something else must be going on.

I have been using RUFUS on USB 3.x sticks for a long time, never had an issue yet.

Heck, it can even check a flash drive to see if it is one of those cheap sticks that pretend to be X GBs, when in fact they are much, much lower.

 

[hainer36]

Eh? All RUFUS does is write a filesystem/data to the flash drive, nothing more.
It can't change anything in the controller circuitry of the flash drive.
Something else must be going on.

I have been using RUFUS on USB 3.x sticks for a long time, never had an issue yet.

Heck, it can even check a flash drive to see if it is one of those cheap sticks that pretend to be X GBs, when in fact they are much, much lower.

I'm just saying that it seems to be connected, no other drives I've used have this issue however.

 

[XavierMace]

I've created oodles of bootable USB3 sticks using Rufus and Yumi, no issues. All SanDisk Cruiser's but a variety of ISO's (Win8.1, Win10, ESXI6, a variety of Linux builds).

 

[frowertr]

Have you tried using diskpart to repartion the "dead" flash drives? I doubt they are actually dead.

 

[razel]

I agree above. Your USB drives may not be dead. Just no longer formatted or partition tables are screwed. I would plug that failed drive into another computer, head over to 'Disk Management' and see if it shows up. From there you can assign drive letters and reformat and possibly delete partitions. If not, you'll need to use diskpart to clear the partition table. Here's an old 2011 post of mine http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2169848.

You can also try rufus to create the ISO. I have never run into issues using it. Otherwise don't count out that your USB port is evil. A bad one can continue to keep shorting/frying things you plug into it.

 

[grimpr]

http://www.vercot.com/~serva/

faster better easier.

Thank you very much, this is awesome. Its a pity that it cant support UEFI installs.

 

[patpat]

v3.0 with UEFI support is out
http://www.vercot.com/~serva/

 

[hojnikb]

In most cases, you can fix those flash drives by using chipgenius to identify the type of controller and NAND. With this information you then head over to http://www.usbdev.ru/files/ (its in russian, but google translate does the trick) and search for the appropriate MP/Ctool to reflash the drive.
I've fixed tons of seemingly dead flash drives with this method.
As a bonus, sometimes you can boost performance by playing wit ECC and RW latencies.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've created oodles of bootable USB3 sticks using Rufus and Yumi, no issues. All SanDisk Cruiser's but a variety of ISO's (Win8.1, Win10, ESXI6, a variety of Linux builds).

I've recently used a Sandisk 32GB USB3.0, the Nano-dongle-sized one, and used Rufus on Win7 64-bit to write an image of Xubuntu 16.04 x64 to it.

I then tried to boot it in a newish Dell Inspiron 11.6" netbook (came with Win10 64-bit). I can get it to start booting, but when it gets past the UEFI Linux loader thingy (BOOTX64.EFI), and starts to boot, I get errors. A few about USB devices, unexpected data, and then a whole string of "stdin: I/O error". Note that I'm not touching the laptop's keyboard.

The same ISO image, written to an AData 16GB USB3.0 Flash drive, boots properly, with none of those errors.

So, either the Sandisk is severely incompatible with either Ubuntu Linux, or this Dell... or the stdio errors indicate that the USB stick is trojaned.

Note that around the same time that I was messing with the stick in Rufus in Win7 64-bit setting it up, my Skype apparently typed in some semi-random gibberish that I only noticed later.

 

[XavierMace]

Or the ISO just wasn't written properly. I've seen that happen many times.

 

[Shmee]

@ Larry: my guess is the USB stick in question is simply failing due to bad flash or controller issues. Try wiping and installing the image again.

Also, that serva app looks really cool! Probably much easier and faster than using DVD or even USB3 install.

 

[PliotronX]

Or the ISO just wasn't written properly. I've seen that happen many times.

Same here, I actually just got one going again by deleting the existing partition but was freaked out because all USB utilities reported it as 31MB. Upon deletion, the entire disk drive capacity was visible again. I f***ing hate making bootable flash drives. None of the utilities are ever 100% reliable for Windows, Linux, and LiveCD images. Such a waste of time experimenting. Grrr.

 

[VirtualLarry]

@ Larry: my guess is the USB stick in question is simply failing due to bad flash or controller issues. Try wiping and installing the image again.

I already did. Used Rufus's option to read/write the entire drive first to test for errors. There were none.

Either the controller in that flash drive is incompatible with Linux ISOs, or it's trojaned.

Edit: The drive was brand-new.

 

[Shmee]

I already did. Used Rufus's option to read/write the entire drive first to test for errors. There were none.

Either the controller in that flash drive is incompatible with Linux ISOs, or it's trojaned.

Edit: The drive was brand-new.

If rufus did not work, could you try a secure erase or similar kind of wipe, mb from linux environment?

 

[hojnikb]

You can only do secure erase with controllers MP/Ctool, no other ways to do it. This isn't sata/ata