I think I might have bricked my USB using Rufus

Less than 3 months ago, I bought a 64 GB USB 3.1 drive made by Samsung for the sole purpose of either creating a Windows 10 to Go drive or running a portable Arch Linux (or other Linux distro) drive. At first, however, I used it to transfer small files across computers. My youngest brother then needed a computer for school as his was in no good condition, I had a spare laptop so I decided to set that up for him to use. I didn’t want to reformat or completely remove my Arch Linux installation from the laptop’s SSD so I set up the 3.1 USB as a Windows to Go drive, which ended up working fine for the first few days (with small complications from shorting within the laptop itself).

However, problems began. The first issue I was sceptical that it was my younger brother’s doing that somehow, in some way, the entire bootloader was stuck in bootloop and would not boot, even though it was functioning perfectly fine the past few days. Not wanting any issues and just wanting the quickest method of repair I reformatted the drive to Windows to Go again.

Hours later, the same problem happened. editing here: I obviously did not do my research.

I did some further digging (booted up Arch Linux on the SSD) and found something very strange with the boot partition (fat32 or whatever Window’s boot partitions are formatted in) and the data storage partition (NTFS). Of course, as I’m sure you know, there’s a boot flag and a esp flag, for some reason these 2 partitions had completely reversed roles — it was trying to boot from the NTFS partition. I knew the reason, and that is because I ticked the rule in Rufus to add an extra partition for old BIOSes (as this was an old BIOS I thought this would be better for less errors).

Anyway, I reformatted again, except I accidentally cancelled the reformatting. The format failed and it was clear something was wrong – the USB wasn’t showing up on Rufus. Nothing’s detected at all by Rufus with the USB plugged in.

The two errors that appear whenever I try to mount the USB are the following on Windows:

14/08/2020 4:23:55 PM – Device configured (usb.inf)

Device USBVID_0000&PID_00045&30719adf&0&18 was configured.

Driver Name: usb.inf
Class Guid: {36fc9e60-c465-11cf-8056-444553540000}
Driver Date: 06/21/2006
Driver Version: 10.0.18362.693
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Section: BADDEVICE.Dev.NT
Driver Rank: 0xFF0000
Matching Device Id: USBSET_ADDRESS_FAILURE
Outranked Drivers: usb.inf:USBSET_ADDRESS_FAILURE:00FF2000
Device Updated: false
Parent Device: USBROOT_HUB304&501fcd9&0&0

14/08/2020 4:23:55 PM – Device not started

Device USBVID_0000&PID_00045&30719adf&0&18 had a problem starting.

Driver Name: usb.inf
Class Guid: {36fc9e60-c465-11cf-8056-444553540000}
Service: 
Lower Filters: 
Upper Filters: 
Problem: 0x2B
Problem Status: 0x0

Now, I’ve read Rufus’s FAQ; I’ve read more than 50 threads across 5 different forums including this one related to people who have "bricked" USB drives with my certain error code.

I’ve already checked and tried:

• Reformatting my disk using Cmd’s DISKPART, this did not pick up the USB at all.
• Gimmicking around with drivers in Device Manager, nothing I did would fix it. Device manager shows this error.
• Attaching to different USB ports, computers with different operating systems. Currently tried with Windows, MacOS, Arch-Linux, PopOS and Kubuntu. Windows is the only one that properly detected that it was a USB device, lsblk detects nothing either.
• Troubleshooting more than 5 times: 3 out of 5 times it returned no issues, the other 2 said that drivers were missing and a restart was required. I did the restart, nothing changed.
• No partitions detected using Disk Manager on Windows. Disk0’s extra partitions are for PopOS, Disk1 partitions are Windows Reserved.

I’m sure there’s a very simple and obvious fix for this but I’ve tried everything that I know of, so I’ve come here.

I am going to attempt to use DBAN Nuker to completely clear the disk, but I do not have faith in it.

Any help at all would be seriously appreciated, as I cannot for the life of me figure this one out. First time I’ve ever used one of these forums for asking questions, and initially thought I damaged the USB, anyhow upon reading Rufus’ FAQ I now think otherwise. As I’m currently unable to go outside (Stage 4 lockdown), it’s better to attempt to fix it myself rather than just get a new one. It also gives me something to do, this shit’s boring.