Just to follow up - I successfully cloned the stock USB drive using dd. I made an image file as a backup, then wrote that out to a new, generic 4GB stick. Works perfectly. With any luck, wear-leveling will make it last longer than the original.
That's awesome. I'll be trying that here in the next couple days.Also, to confirm: I just got the first of two used ZD1100's in today. It had 9.8.x installed. I downgraded to 9.7.x, then upgraded that to 9.10. It's deployed and working fine.
Here's an excerpt from my notes to my future self from a year ago. (I tend to adopt a conversational tone with future-me. It's calming);"The USB sticks inside these beasts look to be SMI 3255AB or similar. They fail a lot. It is possible to resurrect...
I've had this issue happen once again, and am about to try a USB stick like the one mentioned above. I'll report back how it went. It's worth nothing that the stick I succeeded with a year ago was a pretty old one. That may be a factor in my success....
I was able to resurrect a ZD1100 that was stuck in Rescue Mode. The internal USB stick had died. I removed the stick, and repaired it with the "SMI Mass Production Tool" but decided not to use it, since if it died once, I wasn't going to rely on it. ...
