Damaged flash drive

[Moses4188]

Hello!

I was using Rufus for several times because one software form another company damaged my USB drive. Now I was trying to create a bootable flashdrive with OS and Rufus v1.2.0 damaged two of my flashdrives. WIndows will find them but they cannot be formated and if I manage to format them they are ultra slow. Also the drives are getting hot when they are used. Do You know what could be the problem??? I need help urgently. Thanks for the response!

[pbatard]

Even intentionally, it's very difficult for software to damage hardware, and certainly software like Rufus, that simply tells Windows to partition and format the drive, does not have the ability to do much damage.
For your data, you may think that a formatting operation is hazardous (since data appears to be erased), but for the hardware itself, it's not so much as very little data is actually read or written on the device during the formatting, and as far as a standard USB drive is concerned, there's nothing special with regards to the data written during format or regular data.

The only way I can see Rufus wearing out a drive is if you were to repeatedly run the check for bad blocks test. Please bear in mind that flash memory is not everlasting and does wear out after a lot of read and write cycles. So the more you use a flash drive, the less it's going to last. For a proper/non cheap hardware, the number of R/W cycles before the flash wears out should be more than 10,000, and a proper flash drive will also have circuitry to minimize the wear and tear. Moreover, Rufus does not run a bad blocks check by default, mostly because this is a very slow process, so the only way it could damage a drive is if a user chose to repeatedly run the bad blocks check for days or weeks on end.

Finally, the fact that you indicate that software from another company also "damaged" one of your USB drives leads me to to think that Rufus really has nothing to do with the damage, especially as, with a quarter of a million Rufus downloads since the start of the year, yours is the very first report of the application potentially damaging the hardware.

In my opinion, your issue is either with with cheap/poor quality USB drives, fake drives or placing electronics near environments that they don't like (humidity, dust, heat, magnetic fields, etc.), natural wear and tear.

[Pyrepenol]

I have the exact same issue as Moses4188. I have two fresh-out-of-box SanDisk Cruzer flash drives that are now inaccessible after trying to make them bootable with ISO using Rufus. I'm having no luck at all trying to recover them. Please reconsider, I believe the software is indeed at fault. If I try to format it, the format tool never appears. Chkdsk returned no errors. Trying to access the drive with Explorer results in "{*****}\ refers to a location that is unavailable...".

Here's some various errors and things I've come across while trying to unbrick them:

Event Log:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR6. (also similar errors except with DR1-19)
A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service.
The content source csc://{S-1-5-21-1644572897-3448633873-925740956-1000}/ cannot be accessed.
The Virtual Disk service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.
VDS Basic Provider: Unexpected failure. Error code: 490@01010004
The transaction resource manager on volume System encountered an error during recovery. The resource manager will continue recovery.

Diskpart:
The drive's status is "No Media".
Trying to run the Clean command returns "Virtual Disk Service error: There is no media in the device.".
Trying the Format command returns "Virtual Disk Service error: The volume is not formattable."

Trying to format them in Disk Management causes the entire interface to crash. I don't know even know what the hell! Tommorrow I will put them in my laptop and see if the format tools work then.

[pbatard]

@Pyrepenol, I'm pretty sure you would have seen the same issue whether Rufus was used or not, and I am 100% positive that this is not an issue with the application.

As I tried to explain, even if I had uber l33t skills and wanted to, I could not damage your hardware. That's just not how software works. The only software you hear that is actually capable to damage hardware, are not created by accident, but they are viruses such as stuxnet, that have been meticulously crafted to target very specific hardware.

Rufus is anything but that - all it does is ask the various Windows APIs to access an USB drive for formatting, and bootblock writing and copying of files. Really, we're just asking Windows to write a block of data here and there, and that's really all there is. And even if such operations may erase existing data in the process, writing and reading data block is what USB flash drives are designed for, and, contrary to popular belief, due to hardware logic implemented by the drive manufacturer to reduce wear an tear, which Rufus, or Windows for that matter, has no access to, there does not exist a data block on an USB drive which is more hazardous to write than another. Even if Rufus were to write the bootblock over and over again during formatting, which it doesn't do, this is not a problem for an USB drive, as that block gets remapped to a different underlying physical location each time.

The reason I am adamant that Rufus is not responsible for your hardware issue, is that many people, just like yourself, tend to have the belief that because it is somewhat mysterious operation operation, software can damage hardware on a whim. As such, if people read any comment such as "I'm pretty sure Rufus damaged my flash drive!", they will start to have doubts about my software, no matter how much I try to explain that, when you know how the formatting of a drive actually works, they should be as convinced as I am that such a feat is just impossible, unless the hardware is already defective. For what is worth, the Rufus code is 100% Open Source, and while I am pretty sure that it isn't free of harmless bugs (i.e. ones that may cause the software not to perform as expected, but that aren't going to render a system or hardware inoperable), I challenge anyone to find anything in the source that can be considered as potentially hazardous to the hardware.

Again, I have seen more than a quarter million downloads of Rufus for this year alone. And in these 250000 minimum estimated uses of Rufus, I have only gotten 2 reports from people believing that Rufus may have damaged their drives.
Statistically and logically then, it is a lot more probable that Rufus is working just fine, and that you guys are simply having bad luck with your hardware. Also, please consider this: if Rufus was able to damage drives that easily, then it should be very easy for people to replicate the issue and provide irrefutable evidence. All they'd have to do would be to pick a specific brand of USB drives, format them a few times with Rufus, and voila, the drives should be rendered useless. Given that SanDisk Cruzer are pretty widespread, if that was the case, I guess we should have quite a few reports of Rufus destroying these. Yet that's just not what I am seeing. Oh, and of course, I do test Rufus with my own hardware, and I have yet to see any sign of Rufus being hazardous to the various flash drives I regularly test it with.

The only logical conclusion I can draw then is that this is not an issue with Rufus, and that we have to look for the problem elsewhere (yes, hardware can and does fail on its own, even brand new hardware, and even in a repetitive manner, if, say, the voltage provide by your USB port is too high or something, or if SanDisk just got a batch of bad components for a series of flash drives).

If you have a Linux machine available, can you please try to access these drives in Linux and see what is reported? Or at least, try from another computer, in case the problem is with your USB ports/controllers on that machine. Also, do you see the underlying device when using mountvol.
The fact that Disk Manager crashes, as well as the errors you've encountered, seems to be indicative of an hardware issue, and as I've tried to explain, destroying hardware is simply something that Rufus, or any other flash drive formatting utility, can not do on their own.

[Moses4188]

Hello again!

Looks like my problem is solved. I tried to format both drives on another computer and it worked like a charm. I tried to reinstal my PC and tried to format one of the drives and there were also no problems. Looks like something messed up my drivers and then the USBs were not working as they should. Really strange. Thanks Pete for Your time and patience!

[pbatard]

@Moses4188, I'm happy to hear that! Thanks for reporting back.

[Moses4188]

update:

I was researching a bit more and I found out, that all my problems were caused by my antivirus (antispy, antietc...) software which was making some kind of check-after-mount of every flashdrive and that caused that the drives were working ultra slow or didnt work at all...

[testshoot]

This worked for me when i thought my drive was lost:

1. Format drive, shows up in drive manager so I went to step 2
2. Set drive letter

Solved missing drive syndrome as well as drives that were underperforming.

[pbatard]

@testshoot, you could probably have avoided the steps above by enabling extra drives to be listed in Rufus.

[ghost]

I had the same issue. It was caused by a file being open (config.sys) in Notepad that I apparently needed to close before re-formatting. A prompt appeared saying it couldn't format because of this, and then I could not access the drive from anywhere (even from Rufus to reformat), even after restarting, unplugging the flash drive, etc. After googling the problem, and wondering if there was a way to "get back" the drive, I ended up finding this page, and using your "enabling extra drives to be listed in Rufus" link (expanding the "Format Options" and checking "List fixed (non-flash) or unpartitioned flash USB disks") I managed to fix it. The problem (as far as I can tell) was that Rufus 1.3.4.270 already started repartitioning the drive before coming up with the prompt, leading to an non-working drive. I think a quick fix would be to check for this before starting to re-format it, and if there are only "unpartitioned flash disks" to give a prompt saying this or show the option (instead of having a blank device field by default in this case).

[pbatard]

This is already in the FAQ.

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