My bootable pendrive turns into (read only) generic flash drive how to fix it

Question

My booted drive has gone read only mode. no operations can be done on my drive

So i was installing linux (pop_os) on my laptop. i successfully installed it on my laptop with my 8gb booted pendrive. but when i tried to format the booted pendrive after the full installation of pop os. the pendrive doesn't show up in file app or in other locations. So i opened disk(disk management tool built in pop os) and there it doesn't show option to format or to do anything to the booted pendrive as shown in below pictures.

So i opened gparted in my terminal and also there it doesn't show option to format except new option whenever i click new option in terminal it says (read only file systems). as shown in below pictures

So i tried the df command in terminal and the pendrive wasn't mentioned there. as shown in below pictures

So i thought it was not mounted . so i tried to mount it. but this error comes mount: /media/usb3: wrong fs type, bad option,bad superblock on /dev/sdb, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. as shown in below pictures

No physical button was pressed on my pendrive that invoke read only mode

here is the dmesg output

can anybody help me?

Answer 1

It looks like the USB drive has is reporting itself as readonly.

This can happen when the device has reached end of life.

Solid state storage like usb drives can only be written a certain number of times before they eventually fail. USB pen drives and sd cards commonly wear faster than solid state drives.

This means running an OS directly from an SD card or USB stick is more likely to kill it than say a usb hrs drive.

There is nothing you can do when this happens. The drives typically switch to read only mode to prevent corruption and this switch is permanent.