Booting into Manjaro turned USB drive into RAW

I booted into Manjaro 20.0.3 from my USB drive, but it kept crashing and telling me to Log out and login again. So, I turned my laptop off. But after booting into Windows 10, I found out that my USB is RAW and I can not format it, open it or do anything.

I deleted the one 4MB partition in the drive from windows Disk Management and tried to create a new partition but it did not work. It gave me an error that said my drive can not be found. I had to unplug and plug it back in to find it again.
Tried formatting from Disk Management/File Explorer multiple times.

Then I tried cleaning the disk with DiskPart, which started cleaning but gave me the same error that my drive can not be found halfway through.

Then I tried CHKDISK which also gave me an error saying CHKDISK can not work on RAW file system.

Finally, I booted into Ubuntu and tried formatting from there but still nothing.

BTW, I used Rufus in Windows to make my usb bootable.
Is this problem fixable?

Welcome to Manjaro.

You can try this usb stick on another usb port on your system or another system (if available).
But all symptoms point to failing hardware (usb stick) - so I’d say “no”.

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I would agree.


But you could try starting Ventoy on Windows and install it to the USB. Then you just have to put the iso file of Manjaro to the USB drive and it should start at boot.

Using rufus to make your USB stick bootable shouldn’t create any raw partition - a normal, successful operation by Rufus with a Manjaro ISO file would create a ~3GB “unallocated” partition(it’s not actually unallocated, it’s just that Windows can’t read it), a 4MB FAT partition, and another unallocated space that’s the size of the rest of your remaining USB space.

This sounds like a failing USB stick, as was said above.

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It did. I deleted the 4MB FAT partition to create a new partition the size of the drive.

I see - so rufus formatted it correctly, but after using the USB and it crashing, the partitions turned into RAW and the only other partition left was that 4MB FAT which you deleted in order to attempt to create one partition the size of the stick? Booting into Manjaro from a live USB would never change a partition into RAW (as the installer only reads from the stick, it doesn’t actually write anything into the stick, just on the main HDD/SSD) unless something failed - bad sectors or corruption from the USB stick being defective can all make Windows read the partition as being RAW after it was corrupted.

You’re probably better off buying a new USB stick.

*Edit - alternatively maybe it turned into RAW while you were formatting it? That still wouldn’t happen unless you force closed the format process or, once again, the stick was defective and it failed. Doesn’t look good either way.

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Welp, now it worked!
I have no idea why but just normally formatting it from windows worked this time.

I think trying to format it with erasing from Ubuntu did something to the drive, so even when Ubuntu failed, trying again with Windows worked.

Thank you everyone who tried to help.

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