Repairing Corrupted USB Partitions with fsck

When a USB drive contains corrupted file blocks, the fsck utility can scan and repair filesystem errors. This tool works on both individual partitions (such as /dev/sdc1) and entire disks (such as /dev/sdc).

Before runing any repair commands, identify the correct device using:

lsblk

Then execute fsck on the target:

# For a single partition
sudo fsck /dev/sdc1

# For an entire disk
sudo fsck /dev/sdc

After the repair completes, the filesystem should be accessible again.

Completely Wiping a USB Drive

If the drive is completely unreadable and the data stored on it has no value, a full wipe using dd provides a clean slate. This process writes zeros to the entire device, effectively erasing all existing data and partition structures.

First, identify the device path with lsblk, then execute:

# WARNING: This permanently destroys all data on the drive
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress

Once the zeroing operation finishes, the drive requires repartitioning using fdisk or a similar tool. After creating the new partition table, format the drive with one of the following commands based on your requirements.

For FAT32 compatibility:

sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1

For Linux-native EXT4:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

For Windows NTFS support:

sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdb1

After formatting, the USB drive becomes ready for normal use with the selected filesystem.