My understanding is that typical flash memory failures, such as those due to erase cycles, occur at the bit level.  I have a flash in which entire blocks (actually two blocks) are failing.  Is there a common explanation for this?  

More specifically, I have two blocks in a NAND flash device which are failing. These blocks are separated by one working block.  The two failing blocks can be erased (I can confirm by reading by all ones), but after programming with 'random' data all of the bits are shown as all zeros.

Both blocks appear to have failed 'simultaneously'

I know that the flash part is nowhere near its max erase-cycle spec of 100k cycles.


Question: Is ZIP archive capable of storing permissions?
Answer: From the unzip(1) manpage:

   Dates,  times  and  permissions  of stored directories are not restored
   except under Unix. (On Windows NT and successors,  timestamps  are  now
   restored.)


So yes, permissions can be stored.