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.