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I have screwed my removable usb stick, which had nothing important stored inside. These are the steps I followed:

1) Start formating the usb stick from FAT32 to NTFS, until prompted with a message saying something similar to "USB is in use, do you want to continue with the format?" (don't take it word by word).

2) Being astonishingly intelligent, I decided to just manually unplug the USB stick from the port, so that it would no longer be in use. Yeah...

3) Problem #1: USB shows as greyed out on This PC and not accesible.

4) Problem #2: No partition is shown on Window's fantastic Disk Management tool and no options are shown on how to add a new simple volume.

5) Problem #3: device is not even shown on DiskGenius.

6) Problem #4: device is not even shown on EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard.

Scenario is simple, but search is difficult. Why? Because all similar questions are concerned about data recovery, and I am not. I just want it to work. But also I would like to know in which state it is right now, I am interested in the diagnosis as much as in the solution. Thanks in advance.

Silverman
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  • You probably killed the controller chip. Just bin it & buy another. This doesn't quite apply, but the reasoning is the same - http://superuser.com/questions/1125282/what-can-i-do-if-my-usb-flash-drive-is-write-protected-or-read-only – Tetsujin Mar 10 '20 at 13:40
  • I agree with Tetsujin, but that said, windows can be lazy when it comes to not knowing what to do with partitions and then just giving you a grayed out interface. You can try `diskpart` `list disk` `select disk x` (where x is the number of your usb disk `clean` to completely clean it, and see if you can work with it in disk manager again, creating a partition etc. Alternatively download a USB formatting tool that formats usb disks to FAT32. They overwrite the partition scheme and may correct the defect. – LPChip Mar 10 '20 at 13:56
  • @LPChip Related: https://superuser.com/questions/509992/unable-to-format-disk-the-system-cannot-find-the-file-specified/756613#756613 Also has the diskpart instructions in the highest scoring answer. – Tonny Mar 10 '20 at 14:37

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