usb-completely borked?

[steel cypress]

Found an old USB, windows won't recognise it, and the windows partion software can't do anything to it, nor can fdisk, nor can gparted, and of course it doesn't mount:

       dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.```

And I can't make an fs on it:

```mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
/dev/sde1: Read-only file system while setting up superblock```
I suspect it was either fat32 or ext4, probably the former.

I have tried with various mount flags (including w and s), with no success.

There is no visible switch to toggle between read and write that is exposed.
Anything else worth trying?

[minor island]

it has probably reached an internal limit on writes, or encountered too many errors, and put itself into an unrecoverable read-only state

you could try cloning the disk to a file or another drive and repairing the file system