ImDisk - corrupted file system on the flash drive afer cancelling saving content to image

[UCyborg]

I needed to reformat my USB flash stick to make it bootable on UEFI system. Having no spare one and having data on my existing one, I decided to just dump it, block by block to an image file on a disk and restore it later.

Was going to use Linux and dd tool, but noticed ImDisk on my Windows install has the option to save content of the drive to image. I initially went with defaults, but then thought that maybe I should've ticked checkbox that saves MBR as well. At least that's supposed to produce the result that I would've gotten with dd anyway I imagine when simply specifying source (entire device, eg. /dev/sdX) and destination without any extra parameters.

So I cancelled it and suddenly the drive wasn't readable anymore. I said I'll worry about what's gone wrong later, cloned it with dd, used the drive for that thing I was going to use it for, then restored the image I've made earlier. I ran chkdsk on it, which found and fixed a bunch of errors. One file at least got messed up, but at least it's readable now.

My question is, is there a rational explanation for why it's just gone bad? A software glitch? I'll probably run badblocks' read-write non-destructive test on the drive in the near future, but not today, just in case to see if anything pops up.

[frankr2994]

I'm not going to try and answer why you may have lost your drive. I've lost many over the years. As a rule any time I'm placing an order for myself or someone else I hide atleast 1 32gb USB 3 drive in that order. At like 7 bucks for a really good drive I'll just keep tossing them and never saving anything important on them. Other than that for doing any bootable media I always use Rufus. And whenever I have something screwed up on a drive I use diskpart clean to wipe it and start over. First hiccup I get out of a drive it just goes in the trash.