Can a flash drive go bad from too many reformats?

[jjshabadoo]

I am getting the weirdest shit ever with linuxcoin final. I have reloaded it many times and reformatted my flash drives because of so many issues.

namely after loading, i get the black screen with a little underscore line in the upper left corner. just sits there and no loading of gui.

I used to be able to get around this with a few tricks, but now I am just F'd. Nothing I do can get me to load linuxcoin final anymore. I'm using the same procedure I have used to set up 7 other rigs which run fine.

Could the flash drive just be going bad? vould the file on my laptop which i load the drives with have  a corrupt linuxcoin final that just randomly happened over time?

I am at wits end. I even got it to work last night although the drivers wouldn't auto load anymoe, which is something i have never seen before with my 5970's, but whatever i even found a work around for that.

Now today my gopus were dead so i needed a restart and wham, black screen stall.

I have now reloaded linuxcoin final with unetbootin 555 from the linuxcoin wiki, etc. about 12 times. Got into the GUI once, again drivers not loaded. tried work around, fail.

WTF is going on?

My rig is
MSI 890FXA-GD70
AMD Sempron 145
2gb ram
16gb flash drive - crucial brand or transcend brand
4 x 5970's on pci 16 extenders
1250 watt seasonic 80 plus gold

4 scythe ultra kaze running behind the cards blowing air through them and about 3 inches between card. ran them overnight last night at 725/300 before adding fans and then wham. i added the fans and tried to reboot and then 12 reloads later, a big F you.

Can someone please help me here?

I just can't deal with learning BAMT right now. i just want the damn rig to run for at least a aweek and then i'll try to switch over.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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[westkybitcoins]

Yes, AFAIK, most flash drives have a limited number of writes before going bad.

Not sure if this is your situation though. Have you tried examining the drive from another computer?

[Schleicher]

As far as I know bad sectors on SSDs should be remapped automatically.

[deepceleron]

Are you sure you didn't get a counterfeit flash, like the 16gb that's actually a 2gb that has been modified?
h2testw will tell you if it is fake (windows program).

If you want to recertify the flash, you can write test patterns to it, which should make the drive detect and mark bad areas and use spare sectors if needed. Linux's badblocks command will write the patterns, and also test that they were written correctly.

0. (don't have important stuff on the flash drive, duh)
1. Get gparted ISO and burn to CD
2. unplug all HDD and other storage devices for safety
3. Boot off CD, use default boot options, and launch terminal when done booting
4. Verify expected USB device is detected with: lsusb
4. find flash device with: dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device" (or "SCSI disk" - it's likely [sda] if you have no other drives)
5. Then write patterns with: sudo badblocks -b 16384 -w -s -t0 -t0 -t255 -t255 /dev/sda

For the best surface verify and reset, this command line does two passes of 0s (-t0) and then two passes of 1s (-t255). No errors should be reported, or if they were, they should be fixed after another test pass. All 1s is the erase/blank state of flash.

You want to access the raw /dev/sda device, not a mounted partition. This completely wipes the drive too, you'll need to reformat it FAT32 when you are done.

If you are super awesome, you can just boot the ISO in virtualbox, and create a USB device filter so the virtual machine can see your USB flash directly and nothing else.

[pazor]

hi

if you use a transcend flash drive try to revitalise this using the online recovery provider by transcend on their website.

greetings

[Kettenmonster]

4 x 5970's on pci 16 extenders
1250 watt seasonic 80 plus gold

25A at 3.3V? forget it! Buy a reasonable PSU.
you need something like 400A at 3.3V
Keep in mind: There are some more parts living on 3.3V than just your gpus.

[TheHarbinger]

4 x 5970's on pci 16 extenders
1250 watt seasonic 80 plus gold

25A at 3.3V? forget it! Buy a reasonable PSU.
you need something like 400A at 3.3V
Keep in mind: There are some more parts living on 3.3V than just your gpus.

You sir are retarded.  That is one of the best, if not the best PSUs made.  The 3.3v rail has absolutely fuck-all to do with mining.  Please, spread your ass cheeks, and re-insert your head where it belongs.

[malevolent]

4 x 5970's on pci 16 extenders
1250 watt seasonic 80 plus gold

25A at 3.3V? forget it! Buy a reasonable PSU.
you need something like 400A at 3.3V
Keep in mind: There are some more parts living on 3.3V than just your gpus.

u drunk?

[BurtW]

you need something like 400A at 3.3V
Keep in mind: There are some more parts living on 3.3V than just your gpus.

Let's see 400A * 3.3V = 1320 Watts!  Wow.

[jjshabadoo]

It's not the psu guys, when I had it running for 24 hours, it was drawing 1000watts. I turn off all unecessary mobo features, downclock mem to at least 300 and use a flash drive.

I think my problem is running extension chords to my surge protectors. I'm getting three brand new 20 amp outlets in my basement this week. I mean 20 amp breaker for EACH outlet. That should help alot. They won't be 220's, but top of the line wiring, etc.