USB thumb drive issues

[NoSoupforyou]

The situation is thus

using USB thumb drives to install different versions of Linux. To reuse the drive for a new
install i have to use windows diskpart to delete and reformat. But after about 4 to 6 times
doing this the drive becomes unusable. Does diskpart kill the drive?

i have one plugged in now. In Disk Management(Windows 10) it shows as 14.42GB RAW Healthy (primary partiton) but there is no drive letter and this drive does not show in file explorer

if i try to make a new partition and format i get the following error

"The Volume was created successfully but it was not formatted. Retry the format using the
format task"

when i try to format (still in Disk Management) i get an error message
"the system cannot find the file specified"

no idea how to recover or if it is dead. (will add more to thread. also get error if i use Linux Gparted)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why not just use Rufus in Windows to write the ISO? It partitions / formats automatically, IIRC.

 

[XavierMace]

Reformatting all the time is putting a lot of wear on the drive. I'd use Yumi to just make a multiboot installer rather than reformatting all the time.

 

[NoSoupforyou]

I had tried Rufus before but did not work to save the drive. Oddly tho when i logged into Linux to try Gparted again tonight, so i could get the error message i was able to format it as Fat32.
So drive is back working. Never knew about Yumi before, thank you for the tip XavierMace. Will check it out for sure.
Tho if i could stop distro hopping that would also solve this problem