PC crash after writing image on flashdrive

[hemmo]

Dear Forum members,

it is not a developer theme, but I don't know other place to answer my question. The question is if the already 4 flashdrives I tried to image and now crash all PCs, are recoverable or not.
The story: I have to deploy OPNSense firewall and downloaded the image. Then tried to write it to a flashdrive with Rufus. It goes slowly to 100% then suddenly Windows makes a BSOD with error code 1000007e BCP1:0xffffffffc0000094. I am googling the net already three days long, and now I know, the flashdrives are not dead (completely), because when I disable USBSTOR.sys, I can plug them in (without a BSOD) and Windows can read some data (VID and PID, but Chip Vendor is unknown) with ChipGenius software. When I plug them in another PC and boot from it, the PC halts at the POST. When I start a Live Linux CD (DSL) and plug in the flashdrive, Linux stops responding.
The flashdrives are different in size and vendor (1GB noname, 4GB noname, 8GB Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 and 16GB noname). Kingston has a LED as well, so I saw that at 94% it blinked, then at 94,1% it changed to lit always. In this state after 3-4 secs I dragged it out, then plugged back, and it caused the BSOD.
Thx

[Jan Axelson]

Well, it doesn't sound like a flash drive or USB problem since you've tried different drives.

Try a different host system or different OS edition?

[hemmo]

How do you mean it is not a flashdrive problem? If I plug them into another PC (I tried 2 other), that PC will BSOD or Linux stops or simply does not boot. So it is a problem with the flashdrives. The question is, how can I rewrite the firmware and/or reformat them without running usbstor.sys.

[Jan Axelson]

If you are using known-good firmware and software and are following the installation instructions correctly, it is likely not the firmware or software. If you have tried multiple, different flash drives, and the installation instructions don't specify anything in particular about the flash drives you can use, it's likely not the flash drives. That leaves the PC and OS, but if you have tried multiple PCs, that is unlikely to be the source of the problem either.

I have no experience with OPNSense. Maybe someone else can chime in with a suggestion.

[hemmo]

Thank You for your answer. I will try imaging again, but first I have to recover my flashdrives into usable state. That was my original question. How can I do it? Now I have 4 unusable flashdrives and I want to have 4 usable again. How can I make them usable, if the flashdrives are not physically bad (I hope so, because I can read some controller data with USBSTOR.sys disabled), just the image that was written to them has overwritten something which causes the PC to stop or BSOD?

[bpaddock]

In Rufus, which I believe 2.11.995 is the current version, can you select the flash drive on a PC that is working?

If so select:

 Check For Bad Blocks, 4 Passes.
 Uncheck Quick Format. 
 Check Create Bootable disk using FreeDOS.  While you many not want FreeDOS it is clearing out the bad image by installing it.

If the flash drive still has issues under 'Format Options' experiment with those settings.

[hemmo]

Thank You bpaddock, maybe I wasn't clear enough. The problem was, that right after plugging in the flashdrive, BSOD happens.
Now the problem is SOLVED. Here I write it down for future reference.
First I had some time to repair my notebook. The problem was, that starting it normally there was no problem, but it was impossible to boot it into safe mode, because it throw a BSOD 124. Shortly, the solution for the safe mode booting was to remove sptd.sys, (which was part of Daemon tools, but when I was removing Daemon Tools, I didn't do this, however the program said, it will not remove it, because other programs could use it). I think sptd.sys was the cause of the flashdrive erronous behaviour as well.
Then I had some more time to find the cause of the flashdrive BSOD. During the safe mode boot problem solving I had to start the Recovery Environment. Flashdrives were making BSOD in Safe mode as well, then I thought, WindowsRE runs the least services, I should try to plug the flashdrives in this mode. And it worked! DISKPART showed that there are 3 partitions on each flashdrive: 800kB, 16kB and 800MB. (I linked the picture below.) Something was not normal, because DISKPART showed Partition 1 as System, then two times Partition 0 as Unknown. I wanted to clear the flashdrive, so gave the clear command, which was giving an Access denied error at first, then I repeated it and now it worked! Then I made a primary partition and formatted it. With this process I recovered all of my unusable flashdrives. READY!
https://s23.postimg.org/tng1h3pbf/WP_000434.jpg

[Jan Axelson]

I'm glad you got it working. Thank you for reporting what you found.