USB booting :: pendrive install ruined my usb key

I booted from the live cd and Installed to USB Pendrive from Applications>Tools. The installation completed, then I tried to boot from the USB key, but it failed. Now, the USB is completely inaccessible.

I've tried the suggestions on this forum and others from Google to recover the USB key to a readable state without success. fdisk, cfdisk and mount do not work. I also tried a number of Windows recovery and format utilites, but all of them fail. I have tried re-running the USB Pendrive install from the Live CD, but it also fails.

Sounds like hardware failure, but I doubt it had anything directly to do with any software, or attempt to install software.
It was probably a coincidence that it failed at the time you were installing DSL.

I had the same thing happen with a cheap no-name 128MB Flash Drive I purchased at Wal-Mart for $13.

The install seemed to go ok but when I tried to boot nothing happened. It doesn't show up at all in any version of Linux on either of two computers. It will show up on a WinXP computer but you can not access or reformat it.

It happened a couple of weeks ago. I just assumed it was cheap hardware.

Is it possible to overstress USB drives doing the install?

Jeff

PS. I have been reluctant to try an install to another pen drive.

Get the windows 98 driver and try it on a w98 computer

Jeff,
Was this after you set up the USB drive for the correct geometry? Also, did you format it to FAT16? I've installed it a couple of times on two different USB drives now without any difficulty.
As an aside, which might be related, I've had some trouble getting Windows to repartition and reformat hard drives that were partitioned wtih cfdisk in Linux, even when I partitioned using the type settings for Windows FAT16. The solution was to again use cfdisk to destroy all the partitions and then repartition the resulting free space as Primary with a Windows recovery disk before installing Windows. Windows doesn't recognize Linux partitions, but does recognize free space.

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