What can be the cause I can't format the USB flash drive?

[miker2808]

Well, I tried anything.. from wiping, to cmd, to 3 different programs.. formating, deleting formation.. low-level formating.. just call it..
now the USB flash drive is currently having the RAW file system.. and formating to either fat or ntfs doesn't work.. both fast, and slow.. and with any god damn software..
I don't know what to do... the windows disk manager say's its functioning, fine, showing the correct amount it has... sectors scanning shows that all of the sectors are in the 'good' state..
basically I'm confused.. either the usb drive is physically damaged or not.. because it shows everywhere it's fine.. but actually it's not.. had few websites saying it might be a virus.. but unable to scan it as the anti-virus doesn't see this drive.. (only the disk manager and some softwars like the mintool partitions wizard)
can anyone tell me their conclusion? tomorrow I'll buy a new drive.. but still sucks to lose this one :/

 

[InvalidError]

What the person who said the thumb-drive was 'infected' may have meant is that the thumb-drive's firmware itself may have been compromised or bricked. The only way you might be able to recover in that case would be to find a firmware update tool from the manufacturer to rewrite the thumb-drive's firmware if you can find such a tool. Very few thumb-drives ever receive updates, so there is a very high likelihood no such tool exists for your drive, especially if it is a generic brand or entry-level brand from major manufacturers.

The other possibility is that control blocks in the thumb-drive's flash memory have gone bad and now that the controller is unable to to rewrite them in a usable state, it has gone into a lock-down state to prevent you from writing any more data to the dead drive.

 

[miker2808]

What the person who said the thumb-drive was 'infected' may have meant is that the thumb-drive's firmware itself may have been compromised or bricked. The only way you might be able to recover in that case would be to find a firmware update tool from the manufacturer to rewrite the thumb-drive's firmware if you can find such a tool. Very few thumb-drives ever receive updates, so there is a very high likelihood no such tool exists for your drive, especially if it is a generic brand or entry-level brand from major manufacturers.

The other possibility is that control blocks in the thumb-drive's flash memory have gone bad and now that the controller is unable to to rewrite them in a usable state, it has gone into a lock-down state to prevent you from writing any more data to the dead drive.

I got it right? It's either dead, or in need of installation of the firmware

 

[InvalidError]

My bet would be on dead. Trying to re-image its firmware before giving up on it is worth a try if the manufacturer has a firmware update tool for it. Can't fudge it much worse than it already appears to be.