Removing casing of a USB stick

[bigFOIG]

So I have an old 8GB Kingston DataTraveller that I keep on my lanyard. The plastic on the end of the USB stick was pulled off with my lanyard and now I can't hook it on to anything. I thought it would be a good chance for me to strip the casing of my USB stick off completely and pop it into something visually creative. However, my after stripping the plastic off of the USB PCB, I get a "F:\ Application not found" when I try to open it.

If I try and format it in diskpart, it says it is write-protected.

 

[Coach]

I recently experienced a similar issue with a ADATA 32GB USB 3.0 drive. The drive was not even a month old when out of the blue it started to tell me it was write protected. Like you I was unable to format with diskpart. I happened upon a recovery tool on ADATA's website. It was able to recover the drive. The problem though returned shortly after and I had to RMA the drive.

I suggest looking for a similar tool on Kingston's site. Perhaps they have a similar solution.

 

[frontier204]

Hmm I doubt the issue you're seeing is directly because of removing the casing unless there's a new technology I'm not aware of in USB sticks... I accidentally removed (with my knee hitting hitting the USB stick while plugged into a computer sitting on the floor) the casing of a Kingston 2GB DataTraveller about 4 years ago and what's left of the drive is still useable.