How to Force Format USB drive? (Permissions lost)

tried everything with disk utility and nothing worked for me, until i decided to format my WD in terminal using

"

diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ (newname of drive) (current name of drive)

NB - u you lose all files but this is the only way to forcibly get ur drive back, Good luck😉

If you're logged in in an admin account permissions should not be an issue.

So are you logged in as an admin?

If you do a Get Info on the drive from finder is the drive locked?

Never seen Disk Utility refuse an Admin access to a drive

In DiskUtility as I have no persmissions I cannot do anything (First Aid or Restore) except view the USB stick

What to you mean by view the USB stick in this context?

Some USB sticks come with software installed that will give this behavior but you say you have been able to read and write this specific USB stick in the past. Has anything changed on your system or the stick?

You should be able to change the permissions of the flash dirve without having to erase all the data on it by reformating.

Check the current owner/group settings of the flash drive (make sure it's plugged in). The following code will show which volumes are on the system and some details about those volumes:

In Terminal:

enter "cd /Volumes"

enter "ls -l"

In my example, the "NO NAME" drive is a usb drive connected to my computer. Note the two names associated with the usb volume (mine are "johnjaques" and "staff"), whate are yours?

Some flash drives have a failure mode in which they are irreversibly write-locked by the internal controller when it detects a write error. If you can't erase the drive in Disk Utility, that's almost certainly what has happened. To be sure, test it with another computer, if possible.

As mentioned earlier, the first name in the series is the Owner and the second is the Group for the volume. I wanted to make sure you were the owner in this case, you are.

You can use the diskutil tool in Terminal to re-format the Volume if you'd like, just know it will erase all the data off the USB drive.

In Terminal (type):

"diskutil reformat 32GB\ USB"

In addition, for a complete listing of diskutil options type "man diskutil" in Terminal (space bar to show more, q to exit).

Do you need the partion type to be FAT32? If not, it can be re-partioned using diskutil as well...

I'm sure there's some wizardry someone can give me!

Only someone who knows how to fix a failed flash drive.

Something else to try... Lets try reparing the partion map.

In Terminal (type):

"diskutil repairDisk 32GB\ USB"