I wanted to make a bootable USB drive using Rufus. I opened the program went with all the default options and I clicked start BUT what I forgot to do is to select an iso because I thought it would just make the disk bootable without selecting anything. Unfortunately it did not. It gave me an error. I do not remember it because this was about 6 months ago after I gave up in fixing it. Anyway I tried to reformat it again using diskpart and it fails. With Rufus it says "ERROR while partitioning drive" and I think that was the initial error as well. Also during the struggle I got messages from windows saying that the disk is write protected and NO, there is no switch for that on the USB pendrive.
More info:
Transcend 16 GB
Rufus 1.4.9,
Frustrated student :/
Best Answer
A very common indicator that the flash memory on your USB drive became defective, and that the USB controller switched to read-only mode to give you a chance to read your data, if possible. Flash memory is not everlasting and will fail as you use it, eventually. This can happen while using Rufus or while simply copying files using Windows Explorer.
If you still have concerns that it was Rufus that damaged your flash, please see this.