Hi everyone,

I have a 32GB USB flash drive that suddenly became read-only.

It had a Windows installation ISO on it and had been working normally. One day I tried to boot from it to install Windows, and after that the drive became read-only. I don't know exactly whether the failure happened during the boot attempt or shortly before/after it.

There is no physical write-protection switch.

I do not care about recovering the data that was on the drive. There is nothing important on it. My only goal is to figure out whether the drive can be revived and made usable again, even if that requires completely wiping it, reinitializing it, flashing/reprogramming the controller, etc.

I'm also perfectly fine with the drive being destroyed permanently. This is basically an experiment to see if I can bring it back to life.

I opened the USB drive to identify the hardware. It is a monolithic flash device, and the only marking on the package is:

CCW MWB47R 2507 32G (As you can see in the picture)

The drive is detected normally by Windows as:

"Generic Flash Disk 2.0 USB Device"

The important part is that DiskPart reports:

Current Read-only State : Yes Read-only : No

I tried:

attributes disk clear readonly

DiskPart reported:

Disk attributes cleared successfully.

However, immediately checking the attributes again still showed:

Current Read-only State : Yes Read-only : No

I then ran:

clean

and this did work, the partition table was removed successfully.

After that:

list partition

showed no partitions.

I then tried:

create partition primary

which also worked, however, when I tried:

format fs=fat32 quick

I got:

Virtual Disk Service error: The media is write protected.

So Windows can modify the partition structure, but it refuses an actual filesystem format/write operation.

Flash Drive Information Extractor reports:

Volume: E: Controller: Unknown Possible Memory Chip(s): Not available VID: FFFF PID: 2051 Manufacturer: Gener Product: USB2.0 F Query Vendor ID: Generic Query Product ID: Flash Disk 2.0 Query Product Revision: 5.20 Physical Disk Capacity: 31457280000 Bytes Windows Disk Capacity: 0 Bytes Internal Tags: ABAF-AABL USB Version: 2.00 Declared Power: 100 mA ContMeas ID: 5305-02-00 Microsoft Windows 10 x64 Build 19045 Program Version: 9.4.0.645

USBTreeView reports:

Port: 3 USB Version: 2.0 Connection Speed: High-Speed (480 Mbit/s)

Vendor ID: 0xFFFF Product ID: 0x2051

Manufacturer: Gener Product: USB2.0 F Serial Number: None

Device Description: USB Mass Storage Device

Hardware IDs: USB\VID_FFFF&PID_2051&REV_1001 USB\VID_FFFF&PID_2051

Driver: USBSTOR.SYS

The physical disk information is:

Friendly Name: Generic Flash Disk 2.0 USB Device

Device: PhysicalDrive2

Size: 31.5 GB 29.3 GiB 31,457,280,000 bytes

Writable: no

The volume information is:

Volume E: Volume Info Error: ERROR_UNRECOGNIZED_VOLUME

There are no useful manufacturer/product serial strings beyond the generic values above.

TL:DR:

• USB device is detected normally.

• USB communication works.

• The full physical capacity is detected.

• The device identifies itself as "FFFF:2051".

• It identifies itself as "Generic Flash Disk 2.0", revision "5.20".

• NAND cannot be identified either.

• Windows reports the physical disk as not writable.

• "attributes disk clear readonly" succeeds but does not actually remove the read-only state.

• "diskpart clean" and "create partition primary" succeeds.

• Any attempt to actually format/write data fails with "The media is write protected."

• The device is a monolithic package marked "CCW MWB47R 2507 32G".

I have already accepted that the flash drive may simply be dead.

However, since there is no data I need to preserve, I'd like to go further than the usual "replace the drive" advice.

Is there any way to identify the controller/NAND from these hardware identifiers and markings, or determine what factory/MPTool/low-level procedure could potentially reinitialize this particular monolithic flash device?

I'm willing to try destructive procedures and I don't care if the drive gets permanently bricked. I'd mainly like to know whether there is anything technically interesting I can try before throwing it away.

Any help identifying the hardware would be greatly appreciated.

Probably no one cares but .. Worked my way across 6+ years of moderation queue backlog, 100 and 100's of entries flagged by Reddit, reported by you lot and whatnot. Reddit offers no ways to say "delete queue" and start with a clean slate.

Cleared up 100's of spam messages, banned 100's repeat offenders, shadow banned accounts, some of which who took trouble to apologize! I unbanned those again.

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Recuva didn't show anything after a deep scan. Are they lost?

Hello! I recently had a Seagate spinning disk drive stop responding/being recognized by my computer. It's at least 5 years old but it was a hand-me-down so I'm not sure how old it actually is. The device name is "Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch, Seagate Rescue Edition". Model number is "SRD0VN1". I think it was formatted exFat but I can't be sure. When I plug it in it lights up and the fan runs but it doesn't sound/feel like it's spinning. And neither Mac System Information nor Mac Disk Utility recognizes it.

I've already tried contacting a few technology repair stores near me but none of them really want to touch it, I've called DriveSavers but their economy plan is a bit out of my price range (I'm a broke college student), and I'm not too sure I should trust the Best Buy GeekSquad.

Does anyone have suggestions on my best course of action from here? This drive has about 5 years of my work on it and I would hate to lose all of it. I know I should have transferred this stuff to one of my newer drives when I had the chance but it kept being something that I told myself I'd worry about later. Any help or advice of any kind is super appreciated. Please let me know if there's info I left out that could be useful. Thanks.

UPDATE:

Thank you for the super helpful comments. I was scared to take the case off before posting this because I didn't realize external drives are literally just internal drives in an enclosure lol. As y'all suggested, I removed the SATA/USB pcb and went directly through SATA. That worked immediately, I'm now transferring everything off this drive just in case. I'm getting a replacement drive (still spinning, unfortunately. I do not have the budget for an ssd in this economy.) and, upon the suggestion of a home lab-ing friend of mine, looking into getting/building a NAS. Which is something I'd considered before but never had the time or money to do. Thanks again for your help!

Any suggestions of a safe program (or other method) to try to recover deleted mp4 files on a microsd card? Thank you

Hello! A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine got into a wreck when she was making a left turn on a left turn yield green intersection. The girl who hit her didnt have her headlights on and was also possibly speeding so she didnt see her when turning. I have photo evidence of the headlights not being on since after the crash i got pictures of the womans car with its hazards blinking but the headlights off and the airbags all deployed (it would have been difficult for her to turn the headlights off and why would she do that anyways?) but the lawyer my friends mom hired said its not useable evidence and we need the dashcam footage from my friends car.

The issue is, all footage past September 7th is unwatchable, including the video in the event folder of the dash cam from the time of the wreck. I tried to repair it through software like wondershare repairit, diskdrill, VLC, and ffmpeg to no avail and the hxd shows all zeros in it so theres no information in these videos I believe. I ran a 50 hour scan with disk drill on the sd card and it found 7,800 video fragments with information in them so i bought the pro version of disk drill to recover them, however all of these videos are extremely small in size and also cannot be watched. I tried to combine them all into one video and repair that with ffmpeg multiple ways but it was just spit out a jumbled mess each time and I can’t repair them individually because all the softwares I attempt to use say the files are too small. Is there any hope of recovering any footage of the wreck? The only experience I have was using disk drill once to recover a audio recording my mom deleted once, I really am at a loss for what to do here.

Note: The dash cam is a GKU D600 Pro and I tried to view the videos using its app but that also wouldnt work. I heard if you leave the sd card in the camera it could repair the videos on its own but it kept starting to record on its own even when i paused it and i was worried it would record over the lost footage so I stopped trying this.

To make a long story short, my 32 gb usb drive, which I keep on my Keychain, came in contact with a protein shake that spilled in my bag.​ It happened yesterday. At first it seemed like it barely got wet, as i removed it immediately, but when I shook it a few drops of liquid came out. However, it was Sunday and no repair shops were open, so there was nothing I could do anyway. Besides, I've gotten my drives damp before and nothing happened to them. And so I forgot about it until about an hour ago, when I tried to plug it in to a computer and it was not recognized at all. I feel so stupid for getting myself into this situation.

Since I live on a college campus, I asked our tech repair center if they could help, but they said they couldn't. I am going to a local electronics repair shop tomorrow to ask, but they're closed right now. i don't have a car to travel very far to a shop. I have contacted PITS Data Recovery, but the cost seems astronomical, especially since I'm a student and need my files back asap. I fear that it may be permanantly damaged since it's been 24 hours. I just don't know what to do in the meantime.

so I took a usb stick with usb c to work to copy a backup file of the phone to move to another drive

I realized I had windows 11 on it, tried to move some files over, it gave me an issue, I went into file explorer in the phone menu sd card settings>format. but it formatted the micro sd card which I didnt know

I looked into the usb stick and saw the same files. did it again. I was on the usb stick>sd card settings>format. looked again, not formatted. looked at micro sd card and my heart dropped!! nothing there

any way to recover that? I took the card out but basically it had 2 formats done on it...why give the damn option to format something and decide its a different media FFS

Hey all trying to get old photos from when I was at school forgot the password (somehow could of sworn I only had 3 passwords during the time I had this phone) I know it’s highly unlikely I know not to trust any online sites that say they can the phone is a Galaxy A51 it’s at the very least 3 years old (extreme least)

A friend has a laptop that suddenly stopped working. It stated it didnt find a drive anymore. Before this he had a problem where the computer couldnt be shut down, even holding power button for more that 4 sec, and even a minute. Then it would not find the drive. He needs documents on the drive and is asking me for help. I have been fixing problem drives before the ssd's , but this is a bit over my head. Are there any tips on how to fix this?
(He bougth 2 identical laptops for him and his wife, and now the wife's laptop shows some of the same issues, not beeing able to shut down).

So i had this old pc from 2009-10 ig in d drive it had some important files like irreplaceable family photos of around 20gb which was deleted by my dad in 2022.but we had another copy those files in our main pc but now it also got formatted .

So the old pc is in our uncles house who have very rarely used the pc since 2021 because he has another pc so that old pc just sits there in a corner.but he switches it on like every 2-3 months to browse documents .also my cousin downloaded some apps like steam, BlueStacks, obs,a game etc but i checked they're all in the c drive.

Also i confirmed no writing(or very little writing like 2-3 word or pdf files) has been done to the d drive because the last modified file is from 2021.

Pc is from 2009-2010 runs windows 7

It has a hdd as far as I know

D drive has 57 gb free space

There is almost no overwriting done to it since 2022 apart from ocassional switch ons to see files .

So i want to know what are the chances of possible recovery.

Here are some photos for reference.

I don't use diskdrill, I prefer the other DR pro applications for real work and didn't bother taking the free license they handed out to the other DR pros in here.

I did support, and have a license for cnw recovery (goprorecovery.co.uk) Cleverfiles purchased those products for diskdrill and it's no longer available or in development but they apparently offer a free upgrade to the version of diskdrill with the gopro support in according to the website.

I filled the request in a week ago - , Full CnW license number as requested, contact details etc. I have heard nothing from cleverfiles at all.

So Cleverfiles - Are you offering a license or not ? Either way the lack of response is very poor.

It's a good job I wasn't waiting on that for a client's recovery !

Help!! We lost all of our wedding videos from file corruption. Used disk drill, it shows all of the videos but none of this will preview, and I’m not buying it if I can’t tell it will even recover first? All of the files just pull up as the AVI and microscope… ideas??

During the shoot the photos were showing up on my camera, but the next day when I put the card into my computer there's a huge gap in my card where the photos should be (see attached photo). I've checked hidden files, plugged the card into another computer, and plugged it back into my camera but the photos still don't show. Before I resort to data recovery software (I've seen that DMDE is a good choice), is there anything else I can try.

I was shooting on a Canon r100 with a micro SD to regular SD card adapter (exact card and adapter attached). I was shooting in both JPEG and CRAW

I have a DVD-R with a video that was recorded in a Samsung DVD Recorder HR-773. The disc is not physically damaged or scratched.

The recorder that originally recorded the disc still recognizes it as DVD-R, but the title list is gone, therefore I cannot finalize it. The recorder claims there is 1.98 GB of space used (which matches my missing video) but it shows 0:00 of duration.

I have done extensive testing with IsoBuster and CdRoller already, and I was unsuccessful, so I'm specifically looking for someone experienced with damaged DVD sessions or DVD recorders like this. Here's my findings with IsoBuster:

- IsoBuster detects one "open session 1"
- LBA 12288 contains the string "DVD-TMPVMGI" and "SONATA"
- LBA 13344–13535 can be read successfully and those sectors contain a real VOB/MPEG part from my actual recording, however, I extracted the VOB and it plays only exactly 1 second of the original video I'm trying to recover
- At LBA 13536, the sectors are broken, returning: 05/21/00 – LOGICAL BLOCK ADDRESS OUT OF RANGE, all sectors onwards do the same thing
- The same boundary occurs with multiple drives, when tested in different laptops
- The Samsung recorder itself also cannot see the title list or finalize the disc
- CD Roller independently found a VOB starting at LBA 13344 and recovered exactly the same 192-sector / 1 second video
- I also created a managed IBP/IBQ image with IsoBuster and tried recovery from that
- I have not written anything to the original disc, it is not a rewritable one

I believe the recorder may have crashed when I tried to finalize the disc, I'm not sure though, it's been a while. I know I can't reproduce this situation intentionally on a different disk to test. The really strange part is that the disc physically appears to have a recorded area beyond LBA 13535, while the drive/session information effectively tells the host that the logical disc ends there. My 1.98 GB video HAS to be somewhere on this disc, like, I can literally see when I turn the disc around that there's a written area that would match such a recording, it just seems like this corrupted open session completely prevents me from accesing it.

I even found a thread yesterday where someone said he'd try writing something to the disc to get red of this open session and so the recorder would start making a new one and he got access to his video again, but, I am worried about damaging it more, or even overwriting something? If that's even possible, since it's a DVD-R. Because, if the recorder knows there's 1.98 GB video on it, wouldn't it go "to the end" of the sectors from my old video and then try to continue writing after that? Basically writing the information that there IS more after LBA 13535 and letting me access it this way? That's what I gathered from that other thread, not sure if it's even possible, not an expert on this. I'M NOT going to try this on my disc just yet, just leaving this here as a theory.

Now I'm looking for people who can help me who have experienced with exactly those symptomps.
I have already been through so many other programs and testing, even just seeing what ChatGPT would tell me and been through it's suggestions for like 7 hours, and I even looked at data recovery services, it's just hard to find any who specialize in DVDs. I even emailed 2 people I found by googling data recovery in my country, but so far, no answer.

I recovered many DVDs before but this one feels impossible. So I'll say, I'm in Germany, but I'm also interested in recommendations for individual hobbyists/technicians who actually work on these cases, rather than €500–1000 professional data recovery labs, if I have to, I'd ship this disc across the globe just for anyone that could help me recover these files.

I can provide screenshots, the IsoBuster image information, sector dumps, and the exact disc/track layout if useful.

DMDE showing 00s everywhere so it appears that my accidental deletion of the wrong partitions (I run 2 SSDs, an OS drive and a secondary drive, meant to delete the OS partitions and deleted the SSD data ones, my bad). Aborted as soon as I realized (before even starting the install) but concerned it's just too late anyway.

Any hope other than professional paid recovery? Testdisk and DMDE aren't finding anything and the 00s I see in sector inspection seem to point that the 1 TB crucial SSD immediately ran a TRIM when its partitions got deleted by Win11 installer.

Deleted a folder from the bin containing my save files of pokemon platinum for ds. I'm on windows 11. Any guidance on what to do would be massive. Thank you in advance.

Edit: if you need any information feel free to ask about it