How to Repair a Corrupted USB Drive in Linux
has a flash drive. They’re great little things, and they make
safeguarding data easy. However, sometimes flash drives can get
corrupted or just flat out quit working. If you’re a Linux user and this
has happened to you, there’s an easy fix to all of this. In this
article we’ll go over a few really simple tricks on how you can get your
flash drive back in working order.
Note: the tricks outlined in this article aren’t necessarily exclusive to USB drives and can be used on hard drives too.
Removing bad blocks from the USB drive with fsck
An easy way to repair a flash drive, or any drive really, is to use the fsck
tool. This tool is great for removing bad file blocks, as most (if not
all) corruption and unreadability comes from problems like this. To
remove the corrupted file blocks from the USB flash drive, open a
terminal window and enter the following commands.
Users must figure out what the drive designation is on the system before things can move forward. Do this by entering the lsblk command. This will list all of the attached disks on your system.
lsblk
Note: the lsblk
command lists all disks, not just USB drives. Pay close attention to
the output, as it is easy to mistake a hard drive for a flash drive.
To remove the bad file block, run the fsck
command on either a specific partition (e.g. /dev/sdc1), or the entire
disk (e.g. /dev/sdc). Once completed, the USB drive will have a healthy
partition again and be fully operational on Linux.
sudo fsck /dev/sdc1
Note:
this tutorial assumes that the flash drive is /dev/sdc (or /dev/sdc1).
Users may have different labels for their flash drive on their system.
Zeroing the USB drive
Sometimes
a USB drive can be totally unreadable to the point where it is no
longer worth saving. When this happens the best route is often to just
zero out the data and start over. The best tool for the job in this
situation is dd, and it works quite well.
Start by taking the drive label that was found earlier with the lsblk command, and apply the same logic (remember that /dev/sdc1 is a partition, and /dev/sdc is an entire device).
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc
Making a new file system
Zeroing
a USB drive (or any device for that matter) renders the data on it
totally useless. This means that you’ll need to create a new data
partition. Choose a file system, and then run the command!
Fat32
sudo mkfs.msdos -f 32 /dev/sdc1
Ext4
sudo mkfs.ext4 -f /dev/sdc1
NTFS
sudo mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sdc1
Conclusion
USB
flash drives are useful devices. They make it easy for people to easily
transfer data from one computer to the other, regardless of the
operating system it’s running. That’s why it’s so important to know what
to do when the drive is no longer accessible. Luckily, Linux ships with
some really useful tools that make saving a flash drive quite easy.
Image credit: CES Thumb-Drive Style Press Kits
Fuente: https://www.maketecheasier.com/repair-corrupted-usb-drive-linux/