[PLUG] Filesystem problems with new USB drive

[Bryan Linton]

On 2018-07-20 14:48:39, Ben Koenig <techkoenig at gmail.com> wrote:
>  John,
> 
> 1 of 2 things is going wrong here.
> 

I'd like to offer a 3rd possibility.  It's possible the drive
itself could be counterfeit.  There are plenty of websites out
there with more information, but I'll include this snippet from
Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive#Counterfeit_products

	Counterfeit USB flash drives are sometimes sold with
	claims of having higher capacities than they actually
	have. These are typically low capacity USB drives which
	are modified so that they emulate larger capacity drives
	(for example, a 2 GB drive being marketed as a 64 GB
	drive).

	When plugged into a computer, they report themselves as
	being the larger capacity they were sold as, but when data
	is written to them, either the write fails, the drive
	freezes up, or it overwrites existing data. Software tools
	exist to check and detect fake USB drives, and in some
	cases it is possible to repair these devices to remove the
	false capacity information and use its real storage limit.

I did a bit of searching and found a tool called "f3" that claims
to be able to detect counterfeit drives.
	
	http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/
	https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3/
	https://askubuntu.com/questions/1011248/fakeflashfraud-f3-what-are-the-different-types-of-counterfeits

John, before you continue with trying to format and label the
drive, I'd recommend you try running the f3 tool mentioned above
to be sure the drive itself isn't a fake.

If it is, then you're most likely going to lose data if you
attempt to store any data on it.  You would almost certainly want
to ask for a refund too.

-- 
Bryan