On 2020-04-01 18:07, Martin McCormick wrote:
I have killed an 8 GB thumb drive while doing an experiment.I had 2 8 GB PNY drives. One has a FAT 32 file system and the other had no partitions on it as I had deleted the ones that were there. The good drive had it's UUID tagged to mount on a directory I called /flash. The fstab entry is UUID="3453-A839" /flash vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0 #UUID="5A0D-76AA" /flash vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0 I decided to make a full copy of the good drive to an identical PNY 8 GB drive which was the one with all the partitions deleted. The good drive was /dev/sde and the soon to be murdered drive was /dev/sdd so my copy command was: dd if=/dev/sde of=/dev/sdd It worked and I now had two drives with the same UUID. I mounted the doomed drive as /flash and did a rm -r /flash/* so now I had an empty drive whose UUID is the same as the good drive. Out of curiosity, I wondered what might happen if I had two thumb drives containing the same UUID. After plugging both in to a usb extender, the good drive is still good. That's the one whose files I did not delete. The drive I killed now does not register anything at all. It's as if nothing had been plugged in to any USB port. I plugged it in to another debian system that didn't witness any of what I had just done and absolutely nothing happened there either.
All electronic devices fail eventually. Your USB flash drive happened to fail while you were exercising it. I do not find that surprising.
I was once awoken in the middle of the night by the smell of burning electronics. This turned out to be a SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 128 GB flash drive connected to my MacBook Pro for Time Machine backups. Thankfully, it did not catch on fire and my MacBook seems undamaged.
David
