I have a wonderful Patriot 16GB USB 3.0 drive that suddenly decided to puke on me.
It was not working right on any type of computer; corrupted data and read only. You could see nothing even if it was viewable. And you couldn't even reformat it because EVERYTHING including Linux thought it was read only.
I did some searching around and the first result in a Google search had the answer:
Patriot Axle 16gb, "write protected" "corrupt"
In that topic on the Patriot Forums, this is the thing that worked for me:
Thanks you Patriot Forums' Patriot_Ben! Would have hated to lose that wonderful 16GB Drive!
So far so good. I have reformatted it three times and am in the process of copying all the stuff I had on it before.
I just hope it does not mean that the chip is starting to fail....