I came across a USB drive that suddenly bricked itself. So I decided to use Scanner to scan all my other thumb drives as a preemptive measure against future problems. Well...let's just say, I won't be doing that again until I talk to you guys first.
Here's what happened to one drive: It scanned ridiculously slow. I'm talking about >20 hours just to scan an 8GB stick. It also reported 4 bad sectors in the beginning of the scan. At about 86%, I tried to stop the scan but to no avail, it kept scanning. So, I just reboot the system.
After the reboot, that drive too is now write-protected and appears bricked. The data on it is gone and Windows is prompting me to format the drive, but due to write-protection, it won't format it. The data on it was erroneous, so nothing was lost but I want to know what happened. I scanned other USB drives and they scanned quickly without errors. Is there something going on under the hood of scanner that locks the drive while scanning? Why is that thumb stick rendered useless when it was working perfectly find before?
This...concerns me.