I have killed an 8 GB thumb drive while doing an experiment.
I had 2 8 GB PNY drives. One has a FAT 32 file system
and the other had no partitions on it as I had deleted the ones
that were there.
The good drive had it's UUID tagged to mount on a
directory I called /flash. The fstab entry is
UUID="3453-A839" /flash vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0
#UUID="5A0D-76AA" /flash vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0
I decided to make a full copy of the good drive to an
identical PNY 8 GB drive which was the one with all the
partitions deleted.
The good drive was /dev/sde and the soon to be murdered
drive was /dev/sdd so my copy command was:
dd if=/dev/sde of=/dev/sdd
It worked and I now had two drives with the same UUID.
I mounted the doomed drive as /flash and did a rm -r
/flash/* so now I had an empty drive whose UUID is the same as
the good drive.
Out of curiosity, I wondered what might happen if I had
two thumb drives containing the same UUID.
After plugging both in to a usb extender, the good drive
is still good. That's the one whose files I did not delete.
The drive I killed now does not register anything at all.
It's as if nothing had been plugged in to any USB port. I
plugged it in to another debian system that didn't witness any of
what I had just done and absolutely nothing happened there
either.